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?

Comments

One of the problems taken from wikipedia in econ.

[antifoidulus]

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.....

The ultimate problems?

[TinBromide]

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)

really?

[macadamia_harold]

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.

How about somebody taking on the problem of ...

[kunakida]

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.

Re:How about somebody taking on the problem of ...

[UbuntuDupe]

Also, it should give the current "closest" solutions to the problems, i.e., "Person A found that you can solve B as long as you know how to do a C on D."

Btw, I never knew there was a "Union of International Associations". Talk about bureaucracy! My friends and I used to joke about an imaginary, incompetent organication called the "Federal International Comission" (FIC), but man, did we miss the gold mine!

Re:How about somebody taking on the problem of ...

[constantnormal]

"If you can't communicate why something is a problem, then you have two problems."

If we knew enough about the problems to do all the categorizations you suggest, then we would be pretty well on the way to solving them. But you're right about the so-called "database" of problems maintained by the UIA. They seem to be missing a description of the problem in many cases. I guess they confuse a name with a description.

The Wikipedia list of unsolved problems is categorized by the discipline of science that they are (apparently) most pertinent to. In some cases, the same problem is listed multiple times. I find it to be a nice set of problems, but curiously brief. If these are all of the big unsolved problems, then we have a distinct lack of imagination.

As to how one would go about ranking them as to difficulty, if you can do that even with problems that we know the answers to, you're a better man than I. In fact, I think that the question of how to rank problems by the difficulty they present is yet another unsolved problem. It very likely encompasses the framework of logic used to describe and solve the problem, with some problems that are quite simple in a sufficiently complex world-view being conundrums in a simpler world view.

Re:How about somebody taking on the problem of ...

[syousef]

This kind of work is not something you take on by looking it up on a general encyclopaedia like Wikipedia. If you're at a point where you can actually make an attempt on such a problem, you're probably already familiar with specialist literature and you more likely than not have heard of the problem long ago and not yet tackled it.

This would be a better place to start:
http://arxiv.org/

If you can't even understand the papers here in the field you've chosen, you've got a lot of work to do and it may even be easier to pursue it formally as part of a postgrad degree.

The myth that you can just walk into a problem and solve it is rubbish. Einstein may have been a patent clerk when he had his breakthrough "miracle" year but he was looking at problems for many many years and got to know a lot of mathematical and scientific literature in a less than formal setting which is one reason he was able to see past all the old thinking and realise that things he was seeing (notably the Lorentz transformations/Michelson-Morley experiment) were literally true.

I read it on the internet

[macadamia_harold]

"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.

object to definition of "Open Problem"

[Anonymous Coward]

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".

Try this at home

[shma]

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 swear this is not my homework

[StikyPad]

Which problem do you want to see cracked first?

The factors for x^2 + 5x + 6 please, showing work.

Re:I swear this is not my homework

[Gabrill]

(x+2)(x+3) the work was done in my head. My teacher hated that.

Re:One of the problems taken from wikipedia in eco

[UbuntuDupe]

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.

Distributed computing...

[Excelcia]

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.

Easy

[camperdave]

• What is the proper size and scope of government?
  No larger than necessary
  
• Where can government intervention improve on the market?
  In places where unrestricted market forces are detrimental
  
• Does a market failure necessarily mean that government intervention is warranted?
  No
  
• Can intervention make things worse?
  Yes
  
• If the government intervenes in a market, how should it intervene?
  In a way that maximizes overall social wellbeing
  
• To what extent is public ownership of assets and businesses warranted?
  To the extent that it ceases to be harmful to the overall health of society

oh, yeah, the Riemann hypothesis

[straponego]

I was going to do that this weekend, but, with one thing and another... Tell you what, remind me Friday.

Not "easy" but "facile".

[ChameleonDave]

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:

• What is the proper size and scope of government?
  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!

They forgot one very very important problem needin

[3seas]

... to be solved....

How to make reliable electronic voting machines.