Dear Slashdot editors, when it comes to science you don't understand, please don't publish anything that did not go through the peer review process. Especially when it comes to important, hard topics such as P != NP. At least in 99% of such cases, you are just creating empty sensations and helping spread bad science.
As for this particular paper, here is what Scott Aaronson thinks about it (repost from his blog at http://www.scottaaronson.com/b... ):
At several people’s request, I’ve now taken a look at [the paper] and I can confirm that it’s complete garbage. The author is simply mistaken that solving the Schrödinger equation is “NP-complete” in any interesting sense: his argument for that seems to rely on a rediscovery of the adiabatic algorithm, but he doesn’t mention that the spectral gap could be exponentially small (and hence the annealing time could be exponentially large)—the central problem that’s been the bane of Farhi and his collaborators (and, of course, of D-Wave) for the past 15 years.
Also, even if you thought (for totally mistaken reasons) that quantum mechanics let you solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time, that might (or might not) suggest to you that quantum mechanics should be replaced by something else. But until you’d actually found a replacement, and given some sort of evidence for its truth, I don’t see how you could claim to have “solved the measurement problem”!!
As additional problems, the author appears to conflate the P vs. NP problem with the question of whether NP-complete problems can be efficiently solved in the physical world, a common novice mistake. And also, he seems comically unaware of everything that’s been done in quantum computing theory over the past 20 years about the issues he’s writing about—as if he just emerged from a cave.
Sarcasm tags? Sure, we have their equivalents. For example, in this case one can use quotes. Feel the difference between the following two sentences?
I can't wait to do it.
I "can't wait" to do it.
I'm not buying your sarcasm theory. A reporter should know how to convey his intended meaning only.
(Also, IMHO Grunwald's follow-up tweet makes it clear he is *not* an Assange supporter.)
What you may be missing is the fact that this is a case of a pot calling the kettle black -- Zynga is notorious for being the opposite party in such cases. If you re-read the discussion with this in mind, I guess you'll find that many of the posts actually say "I hate Zynga's business strategy".
Yes, FFT may be used in cryptography. But this is unrelated, as the first post in this thread talks about security. FFT has no connection to the security of cryptosystems.
As far as I'm aware, the security of *absolutely no* cryptosystem used in practice depends in any way on the FFT.
Yes, FFT gives us a way to multiply big integers quickly. But all cryptosystems that use big integers already *do* assume that everyone *can* multiply big integers quickly. Even if there was a ten-times speedup, this would mean absolutely no danger to their security.
(And one final nitpick: FFT is not the fastest way to multiply 4096-bit integers, those are still considered fairly short and you would probably gain a better performance out of some simpler-but-asymptotically-slower algorithm.)
Why is this on Ask Slashdot? The question does not contain *any* indication that SyFy actually considers this, so at the moment it's just one person's speculation, nothing more. And anyway, (almost?) nobody here has the data or experience to make a qualified answer to the question in the post title.
Ask Slashdot should IMHO be limited to questions where our collective *experience* can actually help.
Wrong. The new version number will be larger than the previous one, obviously, by 5e-8. And even if you read the number as 3.integer, the new integer has one more digit than the old one. Why do you think it should be lower?
By the way, TeX version numbers are converging to pi, and Metafont version numbers are converging to e. This is intentional. Rumor has it that this should show how TeX and Metafont converge to perfection.
I wish people would stop using the words "bigram" and "trigram" incorrectly. The "-gram" suffix comes from a Greek word for "a written character", the same root is in the word "grapheme". Hence bigram == a two-character substring, and trigram == a three-character substring. And these words are actually being used in the correct sense as well. Two-word and three-word substrings should IMHO be called "bilexes" and "trilexes", or something similar. But a good first step is to stop calling them bigrams and trigrams.
Another misuse of statistics: Many people expect that FBI uses the DNA database in the following way:
1. get DNA sample from the crime scene
2. match DNA sample against all samples in the database
3. if you got a match, you got the killer.
This is not how it works. Say the real odds of a false positive are ten million to one. In a country of say 300 million people this still gives an expected 30 people who match the sample from the scene. Is each of them the criminal? Clearly not.
How it really works? Imagine that you already identified several suspects. If you take DNA samples of these few people and one of them matches the DNA from the hair from the scene, you can still conclude that given your knowledge, with a very high probability the person in question was present at the crime scene.
In other words, using DNA tests is perfectly reasonable as long as you know what you are doing, even if the probability of a false positive is several orders of magnitude larger than one to a billion.
when calling bullshit.
I never claimed that the Slovak version is true and different from everyone else's. I said it is more or less equal to the BBC version. What *still* obviously does not match the news in either country is the Slashdot article.
I'm Slovak. The version presented in our press goes as follows. Planting and then detecting the explosives was a part of a dog training security exercise of the Slovak police. The exercise was a disaster. Out of the 8 items planted in the travellers' luggage only 7 were found successfully. These are probably the "seven stopped by airport security" from the summary. The seven do NOT include the guy in Dublin. That is the unlucky guy that got the eighth piece. His luggage passed all security checks and he unknowingly brought the piece of explosives with him into Dublin, where he was then detained by the Irish police.
This more or less matches the BBC version linked from the summary, only the summary is wrong. Please update it.
Most of all, the article is just plain wrong, especially in the last sentence "Their servers are only a tiny fraction of computers deployed world-wide that are interpreting PHP code."
From what I've heard, Facebook does use PHP, but their PHP code is not interpreted, it is compiled using a custom compiler. And if you RTFA, it clearly states that Facebook developers implemented numerous optimizations that are not available in the default PHP distribution. There's no evidence that would support the "conservative ratio of 10 for the efficiency of C++ versus PHP code" in Facebook's case.
Yeah, funny, but this precisely illustrates the difference between "random" and "arbitrary" in science.
"Arbitrary" means I don't care what you pick, "random" means I care that nobody should be able to predict what you'll pick. And that is clearly not the case if you pick 5 all the time.
I gave Lua a shot, several years ago. Was disappointed, quite a lot. Did not feel right to me at all. In fact, I soon found myself fighting it on many occasions.
At that point in time, read() was *silently* failing for binary data. Took me quite some time to figure out that this is causing the unexpected behavior I observed. During the process, I read some reference and found nothing. Only some googling after I knew what was going on got me to a page that, among other things, addressed this issue with a laconic "binary read() is expected to work in Lua 5".
That was enough to push me over the edge, I left Lua and never looked back, and I'm perfectly happy with that decision.
Which only goes to show that there is no silver bullet, no "universally great first programming language", I guess.
WTF? A hunter can miss a shot because the game catches his scent and gets away. A hunter can miss a shot because his hand slips a little before pulling the trigger. For _some_ weapons and _some_ distances things like gusts of wind may play a role, but most definitely not always. In a computer game, pointing/clicking two pixels to the left of your opponent is the equivalent to the hunter's hand slipping. And this is when you miss, even with a "perfect" weapon. Nobody guarantees you that in the heat of action your [the player's] every action will be perfect. Precise weapons do _not_ make _you_ precise, and this is why it does not break an action game if the weapons in it are precise.
As many before you, you put open source and free sw into the same bag. The article is open "source". This means that anybody can read it, understand the bug, help fix it, patch his machine, etc. However, it's not free, because the author wants the credit for his work. I don't see a problem here. Do you?
Well... I was at the IOI myself (as a deputy leader), and while I was too lazy to participate, one of "my" contestants did actually participate in the Qualification Round. When there's a will, there's a way.
there is a real demonstration being organised in Brusel on April 14th. The main goal of the protests on the net is to spread knowledge about the bad things happening (and also about this demonstration). Nobody believes that you can change the world by a demonstration on the net (yet). But it still helps, if more people become aware of the problem and some of them can and will help the cause.
Slashdot Mirror
Dear Slashdot editors, when it comes to science you don't understand, please don't publish anything that did not go through the peer review process. Especially when it comes to important, hard topics such as P != NP. At least in 99% of such cases, you are just creating empty sensations and helping spread bad science.
As for this particular paper, here is what Scott Aaronson thinks about it (repost from his blog at http://www.scottaaronson.com/b... ):
Sorry to disappoint you, but he's a guy.
I'm not buying your sarcasm theory. A reporter should know how to convey his intended meaning only. (Also, IMHO Grunwald's follow-up tweet makes it clear he is *not* an Assange supporter.)
What you may be missing is the fact that this is a case of a pot calling the kettle black -- Zynga is notorious for being the opposite party in such cases. If you re-read the discussion with this in mind, I guess you'll find that many of the posts actually say "I hate Zynga's business strategy".
Yes, FFT may be used in cryptography. But this is unrelated, as the first post in this thread talks about security. FFT has no connection to the security of cryptosystems.
As far as I'm aware, the security of *absolutely no* cryptosystem used in practice depends in any way on the FFT.
Yes, FFT gives us a way to multiply big integers quickly. But all cryptosystems that use big integers already *do* assume that everyone *can* multiply big integers quickly. Even if there was a ten-times speedup, this would mean absolutely no danger to their security.
(And one final nitpick: FFT is not the fastest way to multiply 4096-bit integers, those are still considered fairly short and you would probably gain a better performance out of some simpler-but-asymptotically-slower algorithm.)
Why is this on Ask Slashdot? The question does not contain *any* indication that SyFy actually considers this, so at the moment it's just one person's speculation, nothing more. And anyway, (almost?) nobody here has the data or experience to make a qualified answer to the question in the post title.
Ask Slashdot should IMHO be limited to questions where our collective *experience* can actually help.
Wrong. The new version number will be larger than the previous one, obviously, by 5e-8. And even if you read the number as 3.integer, the new integer has one more digit than the old one. Why do you think it should be lower?
By the way, TeX version numbers are converging to pi, and Metafont version numbers are converging to e. This is intentional. Rumor has it that this should show how TeX and Metafont converge to perfection.
I wish people would stop using the words "bigram" and "trigram" incorrectly. The "-gram" suffix comes from a Greek word for "a written character", the same root is in the word "grapheme". Hence bigram == a two-character substring, and trigram == a three-character substring. And these words are actually being used in the correct sense as well. Two-word and three-word substrings should IMHO be called "bilexes" and "trilexes", or something similar. But a good first step is to stop calling them bigrams and trigrams.
Another misuse of statistics: Many people expect that FBI uses the DNA database in the following way:
1. get DNA sample from the crime scene
2. match DNA sample against all samples in the database
3. if you got a match, you got the killer.
This is not how it works. Say the real odds of a false positive are ten million to one. In a country of say 300 million people this still gives an expected 30 people who match the sample from the scene. Is each of them the criminal? Clearly not.
How it really works? Imagine that you already identified several suspects. If you take DNA samples of these few people and one of them matches the DNA from the hair from the scene, you can still conclude that given your knowledge, with a very high probability the person in question was present at the crime scene.
In other words, using DNA tests is perfectly reasonable as long as you know what you are doing, even if the probability of a false positive is several orders of magnitude larger than one to a billion.
when calling bullshit. I never claimed that the Slovak version is true and different from everyone else's. I said it is more or less equal to the BBC version. What *still* obviously does not match the news in either country is the Slashdot article.
I'm Slovak. The version presented in our press goes as follows. Planting and then detecting the explosives was a part of a dog training security exercise of the Slovak police. The exercise was a disaster. Out of the 8 items planted in the travellers' luggage only 7 were found successfully. These are probably the "seven stopped by airport security" from the summary. The seven do NOT include the guy in Dublin. That is the unlucky guy that got the eighth piece. His luggage passed all security checks and he unknowingly brought the piece of explosives with him into Dublin, where he was then detained by the Irish police. This more or less matches the BBC version linked from the summary, only the summary is wrong. Please update it.
Most of all, the article is just plain wrong, especially in the last sentence "Their servers are only a tiny fraction of computers deployed world-wide that are interpreting PHP code." From what I've heard, Facebook does use PHP, but their PHP code is not interpreted, it is compiled using a custom compiler. And if you RTFA, it clearly states that Facebook developers implemented numerous optimizations that are not available in the default PHP distribution. There's no evidence that would support the "conservative ratio of 10 for the efficiency of C++ versus PHP code" in Facebook's case.
Yeah, but if you keep the current naming scheme, you get to call the incompetent bank employees "vankers" :)
Mod parent up. And see http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/endemic
Yeah, funny, but this precisely illustrates the difference between "random" and "arbitrary" in science. "Arbitrary" means I don't care what you pick, "random" means I care that nobody should be able to predict what you'll pick. And that is clearly not the case if you pick 5 all the time.
I gave Lua a shot, several years ago. Was disappointed, quite a lot. Did not feel right to me at all. In fact, I soon found myself fighting it on many occasions. At that point in time, read() was *silently* failing for binary data. Took me quite some time to figure out that this is causing the unexpected behavior I observed. During the process, I read some reference and found nothing. Only some googling after I knew what was going on got me to a page that, among other things, addressed this issue with a laconic "binary read() is expected to work in Lua 5". That was enough to push me over the edge, I left Lua and never looked back, and I'm perfectly happy with that decision. Which only goes to show that there is no silver bullet, no "universally great first programming language", I guess.
WTF? A hunter can miss a shot because the game catches his scent and gets away. A hunter can miss a shot because his hand slips a little before pulling the trigger. For _some_ weapons and _some_ distances things like gusts of wind may play a role, but most definitely not always. In a computer game, pointing/clicking two pixels to the left of your opponent is the equivalent to the hunter's hand slipping. And this is when you miss, even with a "perfect" weapon. Nobody guarantees you that in the heat of action your [the player's] every action will be perfect. Precise weapons do _not_ make _you_ precise, and this is why it does not break an action game if the weapons in it are precise.
As many before you, you put open source and free sw into the same bag. The article is open "source". This means that anybody can read it, understand the bug, help fix it, patch his machine, etc. However, it's not free, because the author wants the credit for his work. I don't see a problem here. Do you?
Well... I was at the IOI myself (as a deputy leader), and while I was too lazy to participate, one of "my" contestants did actually participate in the Qualification Round. When there's a will, there's a way.
For example, McAfee would surely like to patent farting *in public* if they thought it would be enforceable..
Uh... You mean, like, they could force me to fart in public? CHANGE THE PATENT LAW, QUICKLY!
1.) Do the Google search
2.) Click on the "Dissatisfied?" link
3.) Complain to Google about all the spammers.
You got it all wrong again, the third step is supposed to be Profit!!!
You know, this actually could be the first time some device would run Linux...
AFAIK since KDE 3.2 Kopete is included directly in the KDE packages (IIRC it is in the kdenetworking package.) Don't panic :)
Why not include a CowboyNeal option then?
Uh wait... I'm getting a dim idea... but surely he would be a good president, isn't it true?
there is a real demonstration being organised in Brusel on April 14th. The main goal of the protests on the net is to spread knowledge about the bad things happening (and also about this demonstration). Nobody believes that you can change the world by a demonstration on the net (yet). But it still helps, if more people become aware of the problem and some of them can and will help the cause.