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Want to Take On An Open/Unsolved Problem?
CexpTretical writes "The accumulation and focusing of knowledge may be the noblest use or purpose of the internet. There are plenty of open or unsolved problems left for this generation. Why not spend some of your time in the dark of this winter working on one of the big problems facing humanity? Open problems exists in almost every field of study. Wikipedia maintains a small list of them and at least one international group called the Union of International Associations maintains a database of open problems." Which problem do you want to see cracked first? Are you already working on one of these big issues?
how to list the world's problems.
Seriously. The database sucked.
If I wanted to find a problem to tackle, just finding a good one is problem enough.
How about getting the problems
-listed by multiple tags
-filterable by area of interest, and skillset required
-prioritized by relevance to science, to humanity, to marketability
-sorted by difficulty, number of extant participants
If you can't communicate why something is a problem, then you have two problems.
from link in story: "... for which a solution is known to exist but which has not yet been solved". For many open problems, a solution is not known to exist. Indeed, many open problems turn out to have no solution. An example is if no solution can be derived from the axiomatic system in question, since the answer is "independent" of all the axioms, or other times the solution can be the proof that no solution can exist, e.g. for the halting problem. It was an open problem, you were looking for an algorithm, and bam, some wise guy proves that you can't find it. In that case, certainly, a solution was not "known to exist".
Here's one from mathematics that caught my eye. The goal is to find out whether 78,557 is the lowest Sierpinski* number. All but 8 candidates have been eliminated and there's a project called 17 or bust which is working on the last eight. As their name suggests, the project has personally eliminated 9 numbers already.
* Some of you may recognize Sierpinski from the carpet which bears his name.
I came here for a good argument
Very funny, but I actually consider that the most important question of all, because if you know the answer to that, you can generate the wealth necessary to trivially solve all of the others. Look at all the nations of the world and observe what a huge difference the choice of government makes!
It's also the hardest because it's extremely difficult to perform a scientific experiment to test it. There are millions of variables to control, and uncontrollable, and you can't grab X governments at random and make them do something, dividing them neatly into control and test groups. (That's why it's hard for people to come to agreement about the matter.)
Could MMORPG's and realistic computer models of human economic behavior change this? Maybe.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
Take a look at open-source software. It's collaborative, usually high-quality, and responsive to people's wants and needs. Apache and Linux, for instance, are two prime examples of how people coming together can do quite a bit in the world, even if in a limited way. Other fields of pursuit have an opportunity to capitalize the lessons learned in the software industry. Applying some of these lessons to the nonprofit sector could result in a greater net impact for society. It is possible to apply ingenuity to hundreds of real-world problems if we have a collaborative organizational structure. We've seen a couple of examples. For instance, look at http://openprosthetics.org/. This group has applied the open-source model to design better prosthetics, and a few of their prototypes are better than anything currently available on the market. I've been working on researching this topic for the last three years. Here's my story: In December of '03, I read an article in the New York Times about the World Bank Development Marketplace. A group of farmers in Zimbabwe struggled with a herd of elephants trampling their crops. With a $108,000 grant from the bank, they discovered that planting chili peppers around their crops deterred the elephants and provided a valuable cash crop. I asked a friend, Sandy, what she would do to prevent elephants from eating her crops. Pulling from her childhood experience, she suggested without coaching that the farmers plant marigolds around their crops. After all, marigolds kept the deer out of her vegetable patch! Perhaps marigolds would not deter an elephant. Suppose, then, that Sandy were a member of an online group hosted by Usenet newsgroups, Yahoo! Groups, or Google Groups, seeking a solution to the elephant problem. I am certain that she would have made a similar suggestion, and that the group probably would have recognized both its strengths and weaknesses. There is no guarantee, however, that this group would include the botanist, zoologist, or ecologist necessary to explore this seed of an idea. Let's then consider another recent innovation, the social network. One such network, Friendster, has a good search engine that permits finding people based on their interests. 210 people in my "network" have botany as an interest. 252 people enjoy elephants. 17 like Zimbabwe. Over 1,000 are interested in sustainable development. Might any of them be willing to spend five minutes to answer, "Are there any plants elephants don't like?" Over the last three years, I've developed a site called Cerbumi.org ("to brainstorm" in Esperanto) that combine these two tools. A carefully-designed mailing list system allows for rapid real-time discussion and brainstorming, while a flexible membership database allows project facilitators and other members to find expert advice. Built-in reputation-scoring and availability tools allow members to dictate clearly how willing they are to respond to certain kinds of inquires, and to whom. An executive summary is located at http://about.cerbumi.org/executiveSummary, and a Flash-based demonstration is located at http://cerbumi.org/flash/. What are your thoughts? Do you think this is a useful tool? Would you be willing to spend a few minutes of your time working on various projects?
"Trivial" might have been an exaggeration, but the point remains: if economic resources are nearly superabundant, you can devote a lot more people to tasks like proving mathematical theorems, and more importantly, you will have better mathematical training. It's true that you don't really need lots of economic resources* to prove Fermat's Last Theorem, as anyone can in theory, arrive at the answer. It just helps immensely.
*I don't want to say "money", because what's important is what the money lays a claim to. You seem to be equating money with wealth, which is emphatically not the case. Wealth is what people value; money is an intermediate good in the exchange of wealth. You can easily create more money, but you can not easily create the value of the things it lays claim to. Having the right political/economic system is what I believe would have the largest long term wealth on the ability to provide wealth -- the things people value.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.