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Travelling Salesman, Thriller Set In a World Where P=NP
mikejuk writes with this excerpt from I Programmer: "A movie that features science and technology is always welcome, but is it not often we have one that focuses on computer science. Travelling Salesman is just such a rare movie. As you can guess from its name, it is about the Travelling Salesman problem, more precisely about the P=NP question. Written and directed by Timothy Lanzone, and produced by Fretboard Pictures, it should premiere on June 16. As the blurb to the movie trailer says: 'Travelling Salesman is an intellectual thriller about four of the world's smartest mathematicians hired by the U.S. government to solve the most elusive problem in computer science history — P vs. NP. The four have jointly created a "system" which could be the next major advancement for humanity or the downfall of society.'"
P=NP is now a buzzword, please add to bullshit bingo card.
How long is this movie and will it have keen illuminating animated diagrams?
Unless that word is being preceded by "Commander", do not use it.
The trailer is:
"In a world where P = NP... cryptography becomes meaningless."
If you didn't hear that in Don LaFontaine's voice you are a bad person.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Not sure if troll or just stupid...
I really want to know about Thriller in a world where P=NP. Do the zombies dance differently or what?
Zombies and P=NP.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Not a horror film = no need for expendable minorities, I suppose.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Since when is cryptography NP? Cracking any encrypted message takes a well-defined amount of time, derived from available computing power and the length and complexity of the key. Faster computers will help you here. Better factoring algorithms may help you here. But P=NP will not help you crack anything.
Your point is correct but you've chosen a pretty hilariously ironic example to use given the deeply rooted racist tendencies of Japanese society...
"P. P never changes." in a Ron Perlman voice.
http://www.travellingsalesmanmovie.com/
Intelligence is largely controlled by early childhood educational opportunity, so it would be unsurprising if the 4 smartest were white.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
With the constant switches to a blue screen with the word 'simplified', I was primed for an IBM commercial close.
But then I watched the trailer.
Is this the next Pi?
I loved Pi!
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0138704/
for those who missed it
I often wonder why people invoke racism so often when it comes to these issues when the reality is... disadvantaged white kids often fare pretty poorly too. If one of your strongest indicators, do you really need race to explain why, generation after generation, racial dmeographics shift less than we "would like".
Yes the smartest in this society are probably mostly a bunch of white guys. Not because being white makes you better, or smarter, but because there are more white people who can give their children the opportunity to advance. Which isn't to say that being white people gave them that ability, but just that, the "initial condition" that we started with has done more to influence the outcome than we want to give it credit.
In short, I often feel racism is used as an excuse to deny the lack of real mobility within society....because if you don't think race/genetics is a major factor, then how do you explain the "lack of progress" along racial lines, if there is very high mobility? Seems to me it may be the lack of real mobility.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
This really annoys me. You can't accept that they're white by chance? As in, they just happened to cast those actors? Having worked in the advertising industry (shudder) I can tell you how MADDENING it is when you've got a bunch of really good takes or photographs but you've got to discard them because you've been told by some bleeding heart retard that you need that one minority in there, who just so happens cannot pose in front of a camera to save their life. This leads to lots of post processing and other dicking around just to appease people like you, not to mention the subtle racism of including a single minority there in the first place. A great example: any number of car ads where the entire family is white and there's a token black boy in the backseat. Why yes that makes complete sense! Why not make the whole family black instead? Oh no, that would be *too many* minorities, they're called minorities for a reason afterall!
Which was pretty rad.
They're all male too - why didn't you pick up on that, you misogynist clod!
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
I'm genuinely not sure how to exactly one's mind would have to work to even have noticed this without somebody else mentioning it to them (which in turn would raise the question of where the previous person heard it, and so on... where the causal chain ultimately reveals one sick-minded puppy).
Do you ordinarily go out of your way just to correlate any kind of entirely coincidental absence of a minority with the implication of deliberate racism, or is this just a one-time thing?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Travelling and traveling are both valid spellings of the word, the former being more common in British English and the latter more common in American English.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Your question is irrelevant since it didn't happen that way. The movie was filmed in a country that claims to be a melting pot and yet the "4 smartest ppl in the world" are a bunch of skinny white guys.
You're talking about an extremely small set. Let's reduce it further to just one: "The smartest person in the world". Now are you going to be upset if this person isn't representative of every culture?
Admittedly, this may be the result of my Western upbringing, but I think it might be accurate to portray the greatest living mathematicians as white -- with possibly an Indian or Asian or two. For the past few hundred years, most of the greatest mathematicians have been skinny white guys*. If you go back to the foundations of algebra, you do find some Persians (arguably "white") and some Indian guys. Given that the movie appears to be a US-centric one, it would have been pretty easy to throw in an Asian/Indian dude. Against my better judgment, I will go out on a limb and say that the African-American and Latino communities in the United States have not exactly produced a lot of notable mathematicians.
But I would agree that this looks like pretty lousy casting. Partly because most "white" guys in the US have shown declining math scores and partly because those dudes aren't nearly homely enough. Almost without exception, all the seriously capable math nerds I know have bad complexions, bad beards, and thick glasses. The trailer should also feature a scene where each of the smart guys is living at home with their mother.
* In the case of Kurt Gödel, very skinny.
The P=NP aspect is just geekiness. You didn't solve it, and the movie had better not be about solving it. That would be stupid.
You can, however, make a thriller using that as a MacGuffin. The better you know the math, the more rich-sounding the dialogue around the MacGuffin will be, but it must remain a MacGuffin. It's the Lost Ark from Raiders, or the Maltese Falcon. Either is a fine thriller, with interesting characters and snappy dialogue.
You never want to read too much into a trailer, but I'm not seeing much of either of those here. It put way too much on its surface: the blue wash to look cold, the deep dissonant chords on the piano, the "oh my god this is the end of the world" dialogue. I got no sense that I might care about the characters, or that they might do anything interesting or distinctive.
Geeks love a movie where their geekiness gets tickled. Everybody loves a movie about themselves, and getting that aspect right makes the characters feel more real. I'm a geek. But I'm also more than a geek. I'd rather not be patronized, and the one thing I know for certain is that you didn't actually do anything about P=NP. Use it as background for solid performances, deep characterizations, and interesting visual composition, not instead of it.
Maybe I'm wrong. Trailers are often not representative of the movie, and maybe there's good, non-trite dialogue in the rest of it. But I'm not hopeful.
Would it still be racist if the movie was filmed in Japan and everyone in the movie was Japanese?
All Japanese movies are required by law to have Godzilla in them and thus everyone would not be Japanese.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
I think you are the one missing the point. The context of the discussion was about character placement in a film thats supposed to take place HERE. What goes on in other places doesn't matter in this context, in fact, its explicitly irrelevant.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Nonsense. Keen is a perfectly valid prefix for slicing or piercing weapons, although a little superfluous if you have the improved critical faet for that weapon type.
I often wonder why people invoke racism so often when it comes to these issues when the reality is... disadvantaged white kids often fare pretty poorly too. If one of your strongest indicators, do you really need race to explain why, generation after generation, racial dmeographics shift less than we "would like".
Yes the smartest in this society are probably mostly a bunch of white guys. Not because being white makes you better, or smarter, but because there are more white people who can give their children the opportunity to advance. Which isn't to say that being white people gave them that ability, but just that, the "initial condition" that we started with has done more to influence the outcome than we want to give it credit.
In short, I often feel racism is used as an excuse to deny the lack of real mobility within society....because if you don't think race/genetics is a major factor, then how do you explain the "lack of progress" along racial lines, if there is very high mobility? Seems to me it may be the lack of real mobility.
The lack of real mobility is a myth. I can say this because I come from a family that emigrated and came to the United States and started off on welfare, living in government projects, and going to very poorly supported schools. What made the difference for me were parents to valued education and pushed their kids to go beyond what was considered average. They convinced me, my siblings, and themselves, that the government handouts were temporary aids for us, and that continuing to live off the government when we have the ability to eventually make it on our own is shameful. My parents were farmers and made it as far as completing elementary school back in their homeland. So it isn't as if they had a great start, either. Yet my siblings and I, on the other hand, completed college, and I completed my Ph. D. in mathematics -- and we all went through public schools prior to college. If I were an exception, then we might call it "lack of mobility." The problem I see is that our government has made it too easy for those who have to rely on its social programs to do it for so long. For many, it is much easier to accept a very modest, but not-uncomfortable lifestyle of welfare and food stamps rather than to make an honest effort to move out of their current conditions.
Many immigrants who come to the US will have very similar stories of how they or their parents moved to the US with hopes of finding better opportunities. They often come from places where the conditions are so terrible that even the living in government projects and relying on the US welfare system is heavenly in comparison. Yet they do not fall into the welfare trap and eventually contribute to society like the rest of US citizens who were born and raised here. What they have that a lot of folks who are "stuck on welfare" is a drive. In my own parents' case, what drove them was their belief that if they could escape a communist government (that sought to execute anyone who defied it) by risking everything on a 2-piston boat set off into unknown waters, then they can certainly get out of welfare. This drive is lacking in a lot of families who are currently relying on government programs (I'm referring to families in which welfare reliance occurs for generations).
Which is little comfort for Dan Quayle
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Q: Does Danny Barclay's character make coffee?
His character's name is Tim Horton.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
I didn't say there is no mobility, just that it is less than we would like. Even with very little mobility, you will always have edge cases.
Also, there are more issues than just being poor. If I were placing odds, I would give a person from a poor family with well educated parents much better odds than someone from a reasonably better family with uneducated (and I don't mean grade level completed so much as equivalency... I mean ability to read/write/do basic math maybe some algebra)
Of course, its also a matter of what you are taught and social attitudes. Did you know that the #1 predictor of a childs sucess in math is not, in fact, any of these factors but whether or not they believe that math is a skill that can be learned or a talent that is inborn.
Seriously.... just believing that you can learn it if you put the effort in is it. Which makes some amount of sense, if you don't believe you can learn it, then why would you waste your time studying it? Of course... where do we get attitudes like that? Do you think a kid is more or less likely to believe that he can learn math if the parents who raised him believed that it was an inborn talent?
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Seriously, Stallman instead of Knuth?!
I disagree with this statement. Intelligence is mostly controlled by your genes, it isn't even disputed in the science community. Has nothing to do with how you were raised. There's a bunch of studies on adopted kids and twins that were raised apart. No one ever likes to talk it about because for certain reasons i won't bring up because this type science has been used to commit some of worst crimes against humanity in modern history. Also IQ doesn't mean successful, being successful has to do with your upbringing and education. Smartest guy in the US is a bouncer after dropping out of college. He grew up in poverty and a broken home.
The 2006 edition of Assessing adolescent and adult intelligence by Alan S. Kaufman and Elizabeth O. Lichtenberger reports correlations of 0.86 for identical twins raised together compared to 0.76 for those raised apart and 0.47 for siblings.[42]
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
However it does not say "the world's four smartest mathematicians." It says "four of the world's smartest mathematicians."
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
And we know that Asians aren't known for that or anything... Really, it wouldn't have been shocking to have a Japanese guy, or an Indian guy, or heck, maybe a woman.
The way the movie industry works, the cast would be three white guys and a blind black lesbian smarter than all of them.
Ezekiel 23:20
How long is this movie
O(n!)
I don't know what studies you're reading. The ones I've read reach nearly the opposite conclusion. So at best we could chalk this up to 'science in the field is unclear'.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/travelling
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
It would be a big mistake to assume that the opportunities available for Cuban-American immigrants in Miami (which is what I'm guessing you are based on your post) are identical to the opportunities available for African-Americans in the worst neighborhoods in Detroit. I'm not saying drive doesn't count, but in order to succeed a person needs both drive and opportunity. Someone with no opportunities can't succeed no matter how much they're driven to do so.
You made the most of what you could do, and you have every right to be proud of it. But that doesn't mean everybody could have done what you did with the same talent and drive.
I am officially gone from
Next thing you know they'll make a show about the Monty Hall problem. Oh wai-
Sendou Wave Kick!!
For your next post, explain why anecdotal evidence is not used in scientific studies.
Due to circumstances beyond my control, I am master of my fate and captain of my soul.
Hardly - the United States is on par with petty dictatorships for income inequality and mobility. A young member of the working class can look forward to graduating with $25k or more in student loan debt and then struggling to find a job in a shitty economy while hoping they don't need health care. Whereas the rich don't have to worry about health care or student loan debt or housing and can afford to take a year long unpaid internship - or three - before getting a job.
I can say that's a logical fallacy. I know someone who won a lottery. Therefore, winning the lottery is a realistic expectation for the majority of the population.
Nice boilerplate pull-up-by-your-bootstraps talking points. And how about when they are six applicants for every open job? At least you have the self-awareness not to join the tea party.
I'd like to see Chris Rock as the fast-talking wacky crypto-dude who learned his math on the mean streets and back-alleys of L.A. Every time the plot lags, he busts out a wise crack.
... it sounds boring as fuck. Are there any car chases, explosions or scantily-clad fembots? I somehow doubt it.
Do you ordinarily go out of your way just to correlate any kind of entirely coincidental absence of a minority with the implication of deliberate racism, or is this just a one-time thing?
There are people for whom that is profession - folks who make six figures noticing that, spinning up faux outrage, and holding people hostage for cash over it. Don't be surprised that it's also some other people's hobby, and the lens through which they look at everything.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I also don't know what studies you're reading. The ones I've read reach nearly the opposite conclusion. So at best we could chalk this up to 'science in the field is unclear'.
Nor do I know where the AC was getting his info, but he's right and you're wrong. IQ is highly heritable. WP has a detailed article on this. Reference 7 in the WP article is to a 2004 meta-analysis that puts the heritability figure at about 85% (meaning that heredity explains about 85% of the variance in adult IQ).
I also don't see what this has to do with the movie. There is a very simple explanation for the fact that, for example, most Nobel prize winners are white. It's because access to education is highly correlated with being white. You don't have to invoke any hypothetical cause and effect relationship between early childhood education and intelligence. There are just a lot of dark-skinned kids in places like Brazil and Tanzania who have zero chance of becoming professional scientists.
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It's highly likely that somebody will eventually be able to prove it to be true or false. (The current thinking is that it's probably false, given the number of smart people who've been looking for it, but we could be surprised.) This isn't one of those "Gödel says this statement isn't a lie" sorts of problems, nor is it likely to be a "Proof won't fit in a single human brain" problem. And unless Charlie Stross is right, it's not even one of those "Maths that are too dangerous for mere mortals to meddle with" problems that evoke elder beings from other dimensions that #@#@!#~~~~~~~~
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Secret-Key cryptography - the traditional stuff like DES or AES, where you use the same key to encrypt and decrypt a message - typically doesn't use algorithms that would be affected by a constructive proof that P==NP. They're basically designed around complex messy mixing systems, not around hard math problems that would be simplified by a P=NP solution.
Public-Key cryptography, of course, is all about hard math problems, though it turns out that NP-complete problems like knapsacks don't usually have the right structure to build successful crypto, and we've ended up with problems that are based on factoring instead, which might turn out to be easier than the NP-complete problems (or if P=NP is true, it's possible that factoring could actually be harder.)
A mathematical solution to P==NP or factoring or a sufficiently useful quantum computer could trash public-key cryptography (either break it entirely, or at least weaken it enough that you need keys that are impractically long), but that wouldn''t trash secret-key computing. For instance, Shor's quantum factoring algorithm at most forces you to double the key length for symmetric-key crypto.
So it would be really annoying, and would force us to use the kinds of key distribution systems we had before public-key. Typically they involve a Key Distribution Center with per-user secret keys that have to be heavily protected and let you request session keys that are transmitted to the sender and recipient of a communication, so the whole system is vulnerable if the KDC is compromised, and is vulnerable to traffic analysis if you're not very careful - but you could do it.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Secret-key crypto isn't dependent on NPish-hard problems, just on complex messiness, and it'll work fine even if we've got magic quantum computers. We'd have to go relearn all of those annoying Key Distribution System methods that public-key replaced, figure out what if anything to do about signatures, and have to build a whole lot of new business models for dealing with trust, since we'd have to actually trust the people running the KDC, but we'd live.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I am an amateur with a Computer Science degree, working on the Hamiltonian Cycle problem.
Here's a site where you can try out my code. I will be releasing it under an open-source license this year.
-- Subvert the dominant paradigm. Repeat as desired. http://ownlifeful.com/
Actually it will turn out that the solution to P = NP is in NP. :)
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
Do you ordinarily go out of your way just to correlate any kind of entirely coincidental absence of a minority with the implication of deliberate racism, or is this just a one-time thing?
Racism doesn't have to be deliberate.
And seeing how the sum total of the AC's comment was "How come everyone in the movie is white? Seriously."
Maybe we need to ask why you think that comment implies that there is deliberate racism.
If you're interested, there are articles and studies done on the statistical under representation of women and minorities in media and how this is reflected in the final product.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Because this movie is so fundementally horrifying that the black guy died before they even started filming.
IT Admins Group: Where you decide the content
It probably was solved by a Japanese guy about 25 years ago, but like most of his countrymen he only spoke Japanese and wasn't able to communicate his solution to the outside world.
The final scene with the 4 mathematicians huddled around a blackboard, feverishly scribbling with chalk while a doomsday clock ticks away in he background. Then one turns around and whispers, “The answer is .42.”
Does the movie contain anyone ordering food in a restaurant like this?
Pfft... Dawkins? He just pretends he's as smart as everyone else by being ultra smug.
Because, of course, vocal outpourings of grief are frowned upon in modern society.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Oh, you see, you're resorting to personal attacks because you can't argue against his massive intellect.
Because everyone knows that you can't argue against something that doesn't exist.
Except Dawkins, who spends his entire life arguing against something that he says doesn't exist.
It's not like he's got anything better to do with his time, though -- he's only a biologist.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Nor do I know where the AC was getting his info, but he's right and you're wrong. IQ is highly heritable. WP has a detailed article on this. Reference 7 in the WP article is to a 2004 meta-analysis that puts the heritability figure at about 85% (meaning that heredity explains about 85% of the variance in adult IQ).
Correlation is not causation. Latest news from the causation camp is that they have found the "intelligence gene". However, they say it's only responsible for 1.29 IQ points. That's 1.29% , not 85%.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
I disagree with this statement. Intelligence is mostly controlled by your genes, it isn't even disputed in the science community. Has nothing to do with how you were raised.
"mostly controlled by genes", probably. "nothing to do with how you were raised", not true. The reason that the twins/adoption studies evidence isn't more widely discussed is that it is of zero practical use -- it tells us people are different, but it gives us no insight into how to identify or deal with different types of people.
A medical analogy (I don't drive, so I don't do car analogies).
There are two diseases. One won't kill you unless you attempt to treat it with aspirin. One will kill you unless you treat it with aspirin. Other than that, the symptoms of the two diseases are identical.
Until some clever doctor works out how to tell the two apart, there's nothing that can be done.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
Correlation is not causation.
Some of these are studies of twins raised separately by people other than their biological parents, which basically makes them immune to this objection.
Latest news from the causation camp is that they have found the "intelligence gene". However, they say it's only responsible for 1.29 IQ points. That's 1.29% , not 85%.
Nobody is claiming they've found "the" gene for intelligence. You seem to be misinterpreting what you've read, or maybe what you've read is a popularization that misinterprets the science. The fact that a particular gene only explains a small amount of variance doesn't mean what you seem to assume it means, which is that there are no other genes affecting intelligence.
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The phrasing of the statement appears to imply a rather disgusted tone, which, in turn, implies that some sort of unspoken racist intent must have been at work.
It's not like I was the only one who read his statement as some sort of notion that he was suggesting that the makers may have been biased against certain people based on the color of their skin... and while I realize that such appeal to the majority does not necessarily make me right, it does seem to make my conclusion one that it is not unreasonable in that regard.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
And in my neck of the woods, travellling.