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How the Web Rallied To Review the P != NP Claim

Posted by Soulskill on from the peer-to-peer-review dept.

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."

2 of 160 comments (clear)

  1. Nerd Superbowl by mathmatt · · Score: 4, Interesting

    This quote pretty much sums it up: “Even at a conference you don’t get this kind of interaction happening,” says Suresh Venkatasubramanian of the University of Utah. “It was like the Nerd Superbowl.”

  2. slashdot has confusing hyperlinks in its summaries by ljw1004 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This summary had three hyperlinks:

    1. "claimed he had a proof"
    2. "hasn't held up"
    3. "spur a massive effort"

    It was missing the only IMPORTANT hyperlink:

    4. "this article". --- The slashdot submission was about an article. I'd like to read the article. I'd like a hyperlink which unambiguously takes me to the article. As it was, I didn't know which of the hyperlinks would take me to the article.

    1. "claimed he had a proof" -- did this hyperlink take me to his claim? No: it took me to a online collaborative discussion of his claim (i.e. the original slashdot article).

    2. "didn't hold up" -- did this hyperlink take me to the announcement that it didn't hold up? No: it took me to a slashdot article that maybe had a link to the statement about how it didn't hold up.

    3. "spur a massive effort" -- did this hyperlink take me to that effort? Or did it take me to the spur in question? No: it took me to a REVIEW of that effort.

    The hyperlinks in Slashdot summaries are always confusing.