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How the Web Rallied To Review the P != NP Claim
An anonymous reader writes "Remember, about a month ago, when a researcher claimed he had a proof that P != NP? Well, the proof hasn't held up. But blogs and news sites helped spur a massive, open, collaborative effort on the Internet to understand the paper and to see if its ideas could be extended. This article explains what happened, how the proof was supposed to work, and why it failed."
While the parent has been modified "funny" it really should be modified as informative or insightful. Scott Aaronson for example has discussed this issue in detail. If P=NP then we expect proofs in general in some sense to be easy but if P !=NP then in some sense proofs are difficult. (More rigorously speaking, given a well-behaved axiomatic system A, questions of the form "Is there a proof of statement s from axioms in A with the proof length at most k?" are NP-hard and for reasonable enough systems in fact NP-complete. So if P=NP proving that in some rough sense should be easy. But if P != NP then we expect proofs to be difficult. This is one of the reasons many experts actually believe P !=NP.
That's exactly what he did. He mailed it to a small group of experts and asked them for their comments. Some of them sent it on, commenting: "hey, this looks like a legit attempt", and before Vinay knew it, his article was on the web.