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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?
What is the proper size and scope of government? Where can government intervention improve on the market? Does a market failure necessarily mean that government intervention is warranted? Can intervention make things worse? If the government intervenes in a market, how should it intervene? To what extent is public ownership of assets and businesses warranted?
Yeah, good luck using the internet discussions to solve THAT problem.....
Monstar L
I have a truly marvelous proof of this proposition however this comment is too narrow to contain.
liqbase
What questions I'd like to see answered? Where do socks go in the laundry? Why do people obsess about the incongruities in gilligan's island? Why do good things happen to people who aren't me? 42. (now find me the question)
Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
The accumulation and focusing of knowledge may be the noblest use or purpose of the internet.
That's your opinion. Midget porn afficionados would beg to differ.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
"Which problem do you want to see cracked first? "
How to get a date?
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.
"What is the proper size and scope of government?" Yeah, good luck using the internet discussions to solve THAT problem.....
It does seem to be an out-of-control problem. According to wikipedia, the size and scope of the government has tripled in the last six months.
Push Button, Receive Bacon
Well, if someone can do something about the guy in the cubicle next to me...
Adler likes to hum as he works, not too loudly, just enough to break thru the usual office background noise. That would be distracting enough, however, Adler insists on choosing his nasal-tunes by whatever the last audible ring tone was that blared thru our locality. The ring tone/tune sticks in his head, and he hums it over and over, out load, until the next tune gets stuck in his borderline consciousness...I mean tone...I mean...urrgggg. And when Adler isn't humming, he's speed/redialing busy phone numbers via his on-hook speaker phone.
So, if someone can help Adler to find something else to do with his excess work energy, I'd be happy to focus on whatever 'world' problems are deemed most pressing.
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
Which problem do you want to see cracked first?
The factors for x^2 + 5x + 6 please, showing work.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
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.
Sounds like an attempt at distributed computing... without the computing part.
Log into web site, check out work unit, complete unit, check in results, rinse and repeat.
There is an assumption in this sort of thing that there is a large enough untapped pool of relevant expertise to make this sort of job distribution effective. Is this actually just a study on whether or not that assumption is correct, or has someone really made that assumption and is expecting success?
I have troubles believing that this is really an effective means for tackling some of the listed problems.
No larger than necessary
In places where unrestricted market forces are detrimental
No
Yes
In a way that maximizes overall social wellbeing
To the extent that it ceases to be harmful to the overall health of society
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I was going to do that this weekend, but, with one thing and another... Tell you what, remind me Friday.
I would start by dividing both sides by P, leaving the solution: N=1.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
I can't believe that got modded "Informative" when the exact opposite is true. People, "Informative" does not mean "echoing my own beliefs".
Let's just look at the first empty thing said:
No larger than necessary
That's a pointless truism. In this context, proper=necessary. So, you have essentially said that the proper size is the proper size, giving zero information. Even a fascist believes that the state shouldn't be larger than necessary — they just believe that a totalitarian police state is necessary for order.
Perhaps if someone asks you what size USB connector is the proper one to go in a certain digital camera you will answer "One no larger or smaller than necessary". What a way to avoid answering a question whilst convincing airheads that you have done so!
What is the proper size and scope of government?
That's easy. It's the government that maximizes the probability of human survival.
If there is more than one maxima, it is the one that maximizes human achievement.
If there are still multiple solutions, it is the one that maximizes human happiness.
Finally, pick the smallest government that will accomplish this.
Now you only have to solve for survival, achievement, and happiness.
Mathematicians are not scientists and mathematics is not science. Science does experiments and analyzes data to reach conclusions. Mathematics (at the most fundamental level) postulates certain axioms, creates definitions of mathematical objects, and then comes to conclusions about those objects based on the fundemental axioms and definitions. The processes are completely different.
-A mathematics grad student
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?
On the list of unsolved problems, there's N = NP . I'm browsing at +3 here, so I don't know if someone already made the joke and it has been modded down to oblivion because it has been told so many times before, but I'll always remember when the teacher asked in class "Is P = NP" and some guy who probably read the joke online said "Yes, P = NP if N = 1".
"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.
If you divide both sides by P you are throwing away the possibility that P=0.
The proper thing to do is to manipulate it as
P=NP
P-NP=0
(1-N)P=0
=> P=0 or N=1
could also be worded as "Association of International Associations". Hm. The department of redundancy department anyone?
... to be solved....
How to make reliable electronic voting machines.
Yep. So you should stop basing your morality on the principle that absolute freedom is the pinnacle of goodness. Absolute freedom is functionally equivalent to anarchy.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
A lot of people have wondered this (it's a fairly famous philosophical question), and I think the answer is... it's not a valid question to even ask. There's no such thing as "color", it's simply what we choose to name the signals that come from our eyes. It's like asking whether two people perceive the sensation of a needle prick versus a blunt strike in the same way. Do you percieve what I think of as a needle prick as a blunt strike? Of course not, because we've named the physical sensations as what they are -- sharp pain versus dull pain.
Same with color. The color "blue" is perceived as "that which causes the blue photoreceptors to be stimulated". There is nothing that literally turns "blue" in your mind that might turn "green" in my mind. We both have blue and green photoreceptors, and we both name the signals in the same way.
Bottom line, the whole question means nothing.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
This is actually answered by Wittgenstein (amongst others) - it's actually not that complicated. You just associate a word with an input into your mind (the sky is blue). Now, all human eyes work the same way, so if you swapped George and Fred's eyes, they would see the same things. Likewise with visual cortices.
l and various others for the bird references.
However, inside the mind, you're actually into linguistics - what is perception of "blue" other than seeing something that is blue? Well, "blue" is just a word, I could call blue "bleu" and green "vert" being perverse (or French, if you please). Do the French see different colours to us? Well, that would seem silly, so the logical recourse is that the name of the word is but a name. All we can know of the mind of someone else (barring psychic powers, and other science fictions) is the response that is given by a person - they tell you that they see blue, or a certain (set of) neuron(s) fires.
Similar things have been done with birdsong - do all birds hear song the same way. Well, so far as it is ever going to be possible to know (above assumptions about psychic powers made), yes. They have the same reaction.
Now, I know that this may not be satisfactory, but for those who know a little mathematics, you could call them identical up to isomorphism - if you give two things a complete set of inputs and they output the exact same thing as one another for each, you call them isomorphic (or identical). In that case human brains are identical.
See: http://acp.eugraph.com/news/news03/margoliash.htm
This seems to have something to do with the answer I sometimes give my son when he ask how to spell a word and I answer "With letters."
The problem looks to me to be one of degenerate labeling when passing by reference. Basically, if Smith wants to believe something about people with coins in their pockets he is getting the answer to the question: some people have applied for a job, will one of them get it? If you redirect by the number of coins in a pocket, but you have not checked that this is a unique label, then the question ends up meaning something other than you think it means. The statement about the man with ten coins getting the job is true for the same reason that "A or not A" is true. Regardless of coins, there is no knowledge about the answer to the apparent question (who will be offered the job) until the decision has been made, and since neither Smith nor Jones make that decision, thay can't know its outcome till they are told.
If anyone has worked on this I'd like to hear if this solution has already been discounted.
--
Power your bright ideas with solar: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
Constraints could be added as needed, including "type" constraints. It would be flexible that way. Plus, the static model is hard to write "meta" features with. And it could be useful for quick prototyping.
One example is a relational GUI system. Different widgets have different attributes. Either you make an entity for each widget, or you make the attributes dynamic. Existing RDBMS don't handle this problem very well, and that is perhaps why we have crap like DOM. If relational tools were more flexible, then DOM wouldn't exist.
Table-ized A.I.
Paragraphs, man, paragraphs!
You look for a P (polynomial) solution to a problem being known as NP-Complete (ie, in the NP class). Those problems (aka "hard" problems) have a best known algorithm of non-polynomial complexity (ie, the time to compute the algorithm is non-polynomial in function of the entry, making it impossible to compute for high values of the entry). It has been proven that if you find an algorithm of polynomial complexity for a problem of the NP class, then P=NP (because you could then transform any non-polynomial algorithm into an equivalent polynomial algorithm the same way you did in the first place). All it takes is to find *ONE* algorithm of polynomial complexity/time for an NP problem. The problem is, nobody has been able to find any, and people have been searching for quite some time now :) (that's why everybody thinks P!=NP). Good luck proving P=NP then ;)
What happens inside our minds when we listen to music? Why does enjoying music or being able to enjoy music make us have more grandchildren? What is the formula for calculating musicality?
Music: a super-stimulus for the perception of musicality. Musicality: a perceived aspect of speech.
A non-mathematician has no shot at proving FLT or Poincare or the Riemann hypothesis.
I think the point is that with super-abundant resources, there would simply be more mathematicians. At present, intelligent people who would have a shot are going into fields like business, law, accountancy - fields where they can make money now. Maths can't compete with the salaries here, and unless you prove one of the dozen problems with a giant award waiting, you're not going to be a millionaire.
If resources were enough that this just didn't matter, I think you'd naturally get a lot more people involved in this sort of thinking profession with no guaranteed payoff at the end.