I often feel sad thinking about how many brilliant engineers are dedicating their time to helping governments spy on people or other governments.
Here you have a list of decade of performance of experts/top competitors in:
security, reverse engineering, crypto, low lvl, malware analysis, OS internals, memory corruption
some of them even work at Google Project Zero :)
This wouldn't be faster than ASICs. The coefficients would be too big for it to be practical.
The equality of P and NP would not itself mean there are fast solutions.
In fact, many are literally mercenary soldiers!
The thing is, it's usually much easier making money off these things then making money from solving impactful problems.
If you're a regular joe and you could spend your next 5 years with a 100% chance of making millions for finding exploits, or a 0.01% chance of solving P=NP, I think the irrational decision would be picking the latter.
The problem is that they don't realize that they can stop once they have it.
I do know of several founders whose first company was a nasty ad-tech company (spyware), and after making their millions, their second company is a much more honorable digital health company.
You probably can find examples where such people can keep on creating nasty companies, so it would be interesting to see if there was a research about whether or not people pursue more honorable goals after they get lots of cash.
~ Jeff Hammerbacher, fmr. Manager of Facebook Data Team, founder of Cloudera
This quote isn't just about people working directly on ad tech and ad targeting algorithms, but any product that is "free" and ad supported.
After selecting "Reject all" in the cookie dialog, the cookie was literally spinning (they have a spinning wheel animation for processing your cookie response!) for >5s on "We are processing your cookie settings request". If this is what the best minds of our generation are achieving then help us god!
Responsible disclosure is for the gullible.
The market keeps saying “this is what its worth”
This is a bit beyond my ken :)
If P=NP, then those previously thought to be intractable problems, are actually tractable. And the foundation of a lot of security-related engineering collapses.
While that means most protocols used for cryptography would need to be replaced (hashing, digital signatures, etc) it also means other combinatorics algorithms (traveling salesman, protein structure prediction) would become solvable which may been boon for logistics and/or computational science.
(I think this is correct) If P=NP there will still be intractable problems; they would be ones where the solutions can't be verified in polynomial time... along the lines of verifying the solution is correct is as complicated as brute forcing the solution.
Note: it's been a while since my computation theory class. ;) I am reading over https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P_versus_NP_problem and relearning the fine house of cards theoreticians have divided this problem into. There is a "consequences of P=NP" towards the bottom that sums it up better than I can.
"A proof that P = NP could have stunning practical consequences if the proof leads to efficient methods for solving some of the important problems in NP."
Note the "if". It is extremely important to the meaning. It's very possible for P to equal NP, but for that "if" to be false.
Not really. They depend on guessing being slow. P, just P, can do slow. P can be bigger than the universe even with low values of n.
Which would make the btc blockchain an incredibly expensive and valuable data set, for someone armed with the right mathematical theory.