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Mathematicians Race To Debunk German Man Who Claimed To Solve The 'P Versus NP' Problem (vice.com)
A German man -- Norbert Blum -- who claimed that P is not equal to NP is seeing several challenges to his solution. From a report: Numerous mathematicians have begun to raise questions about whether the German mathematician solved it at all. Since Blum's paper was published, mathematicians and computer scientists worldwide have been racking their brains as to whether the Bonn-based researcher has, in fact, solved this Millennium Prize Problem. After an initially positive reaction, such as the one from Stanford mathematician Reza Zadeh, doubts are beginning to arise about whether Blum's reasoning is correct. In a forum for theoretical mathematics, a user named Mikhail reached out to Alexander Razborov -- the author of the paper on which Blum's proof is based -- to ask him about Blum's paper. Razborov purports to have discovered an error in Blum's paper: Blum's main argument contradicts one of Razborov's key assumptions. And mathematician Scott Aaronson, who is something of an authority in the math community when it comes to P vs. NP, said he would be willing to bet $200,000 that Blum's mathematical proof won't endure. "Please stop asking," Aaronson writes. If the proof hasn't been refuted, "you can come back and tell me I was a closed-minded fool." In the week since Aaronson's initial blog post, other mathematicians have begun trying to poke holes in Blum's proof. Dick Lipton, a computer science professor at Georgia Tech, wrote in a blog post that Blum's proof "passes many filters of seriousness," but suggested there may be some problems with it. A commenter on that blog post, known only as "vloodin," noted that there was a "single error on a subtle point" in the proof; other mathematicians have since chimed in and confirmed vloodin's initial analysis, and so the emerging consensus among many mathematicians is that a solve for P vs. NP remains elusive.
Oh, so it's implied but not proven. Gotcha.
Mathematicians may read different things from the word "imply" than you do.
Hmm this does not sound right,
It is.
shuld the reaction not be: New thery, lut`s test it and see what the results are?
No, it's maths, not science. There is an absolute truth here. Either the proof is correct or it is not. The best way of figuring out if it's correct is to look for flaws.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
He was talking about P!=NP. Almost no mathematician believes that P=NP. Notable exception: Donald Knuth once expressed your point of view.
As I recall, what Knuth said was that the worst possible solution of the P/NP question would be a non-constructive proof that P=NP. That would tell us that all problems are "easy", but not tell us anything about how to solve them efficiently. It would mean that we could never rely on problems to be hard where we want them to (e.g. cryptography), but wouldn't necessarily give us any insight about how to make them easy.
I don't think he ever expressed the opinion that he thought it likely that P=NP.
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