Slashdot Mirror
Mathematician Who Claimed 'P Is Not Equal To NP' Says His Proof Is Wrong (arxiv.org)
Earlier this month, Norbert Blum, a German mathematician, had published a research paper in which he implied that P is not equal to NP. The abstract of the post read: Berg and Ulfberg and Amano and Maruoka have used CNF-DNF-approximators to prove exponential lower bounds for the monotone network complexity of the clique function and of Andreev's function. We show that these approximators can be used to prove the same lower bound for their non-monotone network complexity. This implies P not equal NP. Since the publication of that paper, several mathematicians have raised concerns with Blum's methodology, with some saying that there are flaws in it. Blum has now updated the research paper to add: The proof is wrong. I shall elaborate precisely what the mistake is. For doing this, I need some time.
Maybe in a very academic sense, but practically speaking P != NP is overwhelmingly assumed to be the case, even if not proven. A valid proof of that being the case would be some buzz in the academics of math, but the rest of the world would shrug and move on.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I was about to mod you up after reading your first sentence, but then the second came. Look, we all know of people who hop on the bandwagon of science and are as stubborn as anyone.
That's why MBGMorden used "science" and "religion" not "scientists", and "religious people". People can be stubborn and non-corrective, but science as a whole corrects itself. In the same vein, Religion (western at least) sticks to ideas like nothing else. How many hundreds of years did it take for the Catholic church to admit that maybe it shouldn't have punished Galileo?
Look no further than the books of each craft. Science books change all the time. Go find some Geology books from the 1940s, and you'll see crazy explanations we now know are wrong about what causes Earthquakes. Those ideas died out after Plate Tectonics took over in the 1950s or so.
By contrast, the Bible was canonized long, long ago and can't change. Religion changes very, very, very slowly. Much of the change is do to splinter groups forming and going off and doing their own thing. That's the perfect example of inflexibility. Splinter factions don't really happen much in science, and when they do, it's temporary until there's more data available, and consensus forms. Try that in religion!
Math is notably better on this score than the other sciences. I can think of other mathematicians who did a 180 and had to say "I was wrong", within a few days of a major publication, due to to critical objections. I can't think of any like that for natural sciences.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Which makes religion subject to evolution (if the belief is stupid enough, its follower eventually die out) and science highly adaptive. Of course, you do only get concrete absolute truth in religion, (in Mathematics, you get absolute truth too, but it will be abstract and applicability to reality will never be absolute), and many people are looking for that, probably because they cannot deal with uncertainty. So the other thing about religion is that it uses its "truths" merely as mechanism to acquire and control its followers, truth is completely irrelevant (apart from the evolution angle).
Will be interesting to see whether Blum or somebody else can fix the proof. May take a while though.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Objectively, that is true. Human beings and rocks are basically the same thing, from a universal context.
To he human beings themselves, though, it's clearly not true.
But we, the ones having this conversation, are human beings. Thus, human beings matter a great deal more than rocks in the only context that matters, our own. That importance is not hinged on any sort of "why" we exist. In fact, any hypothetical "why" that involves god(s) actually would reduce our importance. See Christians whose whole world view is based on how awful and useless we are as creatures.