A Shallow Book for the Illiterate Masses
on
Longitude
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· Score: 1
This book is pretty much a waste of time if you know anything about the longitude prize - it contains little more than the kind of stories grandparents tell little children (i.e. little to no actual research or analysis, a nice glossy surface sheen on anything that might be related to scary subjects like physics and mechanical engineering, etc). If you don't know anything about the prize, I guess it's worth the hour or so it takes to read, but there are far better books to be read on the subject. The Quest for Longitude : The Proceedings of the Longitude Symposium is one of them, and the name of the other esacpes me...
Uh... there is a law in the pipeline that will not only disallow drug related sites, but will also disallow linking to such sites. It's called the Methampheta min e Anti-Proliferation Act. Take a look.
All these people seem to be complaining about scientists chasing the Nobel prize, implying that that's a bad thing to be taking into consideration, etc.
I mean, if you worked for several years at a company developing some sort of important software , wouldn't you be sort of pissed off if someone else came out with essentially the same product during an unforeseen server outage on your company's side?
The nobel prize is to a scientist as writing some piece of software like Napster or Linux is to a programmer - it provides:
Lifelong job security.
Instant name recognition.
And most important of all, CONTINUED FUNDING FROM THE GOVERNMENT.
It's "proof" that they accomplished something. Without said proof, even if you are very, very close, no one is going to give you any more money (at least not politicians - remember, sonny boy, these fancy partickal excellorators come out of my taxpayers pockets, and they ain't done one dang thing but ask for more money! Look at what happened to the Princeton Plasma Physics lab - they were close to actually getting a positive energy return on a fusion reactor (closer than anyone else), but since they weren't actually getting one, they lost their funding and their accelerator just sits there. I've talked to some of the physicists, and believe me, they are bitter about it.
If you actually think high school students have the right to free speech in this country, you need to do some reading. They don't have any sort of right to speech, privacy, press, etc at least within school... and possibly even outside it. Ever seen metal detectors at high schools? Random locker searches? Random drug testing for anyone involved in extracurriculars (probably the most ridiculous of them all)? All these things happen, though with greater or lesser degrees of pervasiveness.
I'm not saying this is a good thing - in fact I think it's a terrible thing - but that's the way it is right now. And since no one really cares about teenagers' rights except teenagers, that's probably the way it will stay.
You're right about the first part - I should have said _any_ other NP problem (the classes go P
But about the 2nd part, prime factorization is definitely _not_ suspected to be exponentially complex, because it simply isn't. For instance, one non-deterministic polynomial algorithm would be to find any one factor (try all numbers up to sqrt(integer), then find factors of those factors, etc. Since it's nondeterministic, total time is n^2 (n attempts - only n because of non-determinism - to find a factor at a cost of n each time).
As with almost any mass media article about mathematics, this article is full of errors that nitpicky people like me feel the need to point out.
First of all, some basic info you may be lacking. The basic P vs. NP problem is most simply stated as "P = NP?" P stands for Polynomial time, and NP stands for Nondeterministic Polynomial time, as in you can solve the problem is p(n) steps, where p is a polynomial and n is the size of the input file.
Beyond that, some heinous mistakes they made:
1. P is a subset of NP, not a distinct set. Thus all P problems are NP (obviously, if you read the definition).
2. Internet encryption (at least RSA) is NOT KNOWN TO BE EVEN NP-COMPLETE. This is something I think a lot of people don't realize, and I have talked to many mathematicians who think that factorization will eventually be shown to be in P and thus RSA and all other such encryption schemes will collapse. All it takes is one brilliant hacker...
3. The answer has to do with determining consistency, which is very, very different from solving the game in a game theoretical sense.
And some slightly more nitpicky issues:
1. NP-Complete problems are those problems whose solutions can be polynomial time transformed to solutions to _any_ other problem. That is why if you find a solution to the minesweeper problem, NP-Complete will cease to exist and P=NP.
2. No serious mathematician believes that P=NP.
Anyone who wants to know more should read Sipser's book "Introduction to the Theory of Computation" which I highly recommend.
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This book is pretty much a waste of time if you know anything about the longitude prize - it contains little more than the kind of stories grandparents tell little children (i.e. little to no actual research or analysis, a nice glossy surface sheen on anything that might be related to scary subjects like physics and mechanical engineering, etc). If you don't know anything about the prize, I guess it's worth the hour or so it takes to read, but there are far better books to be read on the subject. The Quest for Longitude : The Proceedings of the Longitude Symposium is one of them, and the name of the other esacpes me...
Uh... there is a law in the pipeline that will not only disallow drug related sites, but will also disallow linking to such sites. It's called the Methampheta min e Anti-Proliferation Act. Take a look.
All these people seem to be complaining about scientists chasing the Nobel prize, implying that that's a bad thing to be taking into consideration, etc.
I mean, if you worked for several years at a company developing some sort of important software , wouldn't you be sort of pissed off if someone else came out with essentially the same product during an unforeseen server outage on your company's side?
The nobel prize is to a scientist as writing some piece of software like Napster or Linux is to a programmer - it provides:
It's "proof" that they accomplished something. Without said proof, even if you are very, very close, no one is going to give you any more money (at least not politicians - remember, sonny boy, these fancy partickal excellorators come out of my taxpayers pockets, and they ain't done one dang thing but ask for more money! Look at what happened to the Princeton Plasma Physics lab - they were close to actually getting a positive energy return on a fusion reactor (closer than anyone else), but since they weren't actually getting one, they lost their funding and their accelerator just sits there. I've talked to some of the physicists, and believe me, they are bitter about it.
If you actually think high school students have the right to free speech in this country, you need to do some reading. They don't have any sort of right to speech, privacy, press, etc at least within school... and possibly even outside it. Ever seen metal detectors at high schools? Random locker searches? Random drug testing for anyone involved in extracurriculars (probably the most ridiculous of them all)? All these things happen, though with greater or lesser degrees of pervasiveness.
I'm not saying this is a good thing - in fact I think it's a terrible thing - but that's the way it is right now. And since no one really cares about teenagers' rights except teenagers, that's probably the way it will stay.
You're right about the first part - I should have said _any_ other NP problem (the classes go P
But about the 2nd part, prime factorization is definitely _not_ suspected to be exponentially complex, because it simply isn't. For instance, one non-deterministic polynomial algorithm would be to find any one factor (try all numbers up to sqrt(integer), then find factors of those factors, etc. Since it's nondeterministic, total time is n^2 (n attempts - only n because of non-determinism - to find a factor at a cost of n each time).
As with almost any mass media article about mathematics, this article is full of errors that nitpicky people like me feel the need to point out. First of all, some basic info you may be lacking. The basic P vs. NP problem is most simply stated as "P = NP?" P stands for Polynomial time, and NP stands for Nondeterministic Polynomial time, as in you can solve the problem is p(n) steps, where p is a polynomial and n is the size of the input file. Beyond that, some heinous mistakes they made: 1. P is a subset of NP, not a distinct set. Thus all P problems are NP (obviously, if you read the definition). 2. Internet encryption (at least RSA) is NOT KNOWN TO BE EVEN NP-COMPLETE. This is something I think a lot of people don't realize, and I have talked to many mathematicians who think that factorization will eventually be shown to be in P and thus RSA and all other such encryption schemes will collapse. All it takes is one brilliant hacker... 3. The answer has to do with determining consistency, which is very, very different from solving the game in a game theoretical sense. And some slightly more nitpicky issues: 1. NP-Complete problems are those problems whose solutions can be polynomial time transformed to solutions to _any_ other problem. That is why if you find a solution to the minesweeper problem, NP-Complete will cease to exist and P=NP. 2. No serious mathematician believes that P=NP. Anyone who wants to know more should read Sipser's book "Introduction to the Theory of Computation" which I highly recommend.