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."

Comments

Re:A simpler proof? Please?

[Zalbik]

Many of the fundamental proofs in this area aren't so difficult to understand. Certainly in computing theory classes, proofs were generally a page or two and didn't involve (much) advanced math.

Maybe it's just me, but it "feels" like there should be a simpler way to go about showing that P != NP.

It's just you.

See, the problem is that it's possible that P = NP. For example, say N=1, then trivially:
        P = P
        P = 1 x P
        P = NP
This also works for P=0.

The problem is, we can't get the mathematicians to agree whether N=1 or P=0.