Apparently P = NP now... | Hacker News Reader

Apparently P = NP now...

arxiv.org

10 pointsjcapote9 comments

This paper looks like garbage to me. The English is poor and at points entirely incoherent; the author has no prior publications; he admits to having submitted two earlier proofs of P=NP which were found to have errors; and he wastes time on minutiae rather than providing any overall framework for his results.

There's a lot of crap that gets posted to the arXiv. Should always wait for the experts to chime in before taking anything on the arXiv at face value.

That PDF fails all my first-order heuristics for a non-crackpot paper, and same goes for a google search on the author's name (no publications, no webpage, etc).

EDIT: Upvoted to #1? Seriously?

> Upvoted to #1? Seriously?

I'll be honest; I upvoted because I was skeptical and wanted to hear the opinion of those on HN who know more about this stuff than I do (it had no comments at the time).

I did the same.

This can't be true. He references Wikipedia.

Not to come across as a skeptic but let's see how long this one lasts. If true, n^11 is fairly hideous a computational burden.

Is there merit to this statement? I'm not a compsci/math major, but it seems like a big deal if it were true.

It would be huge news if true. Unfortunately, arXiv is not peer reviewed. Thus it needs to be thoroughly examined before it has any merit. I have no idea if anyone is actually looking at this particular claim.

Non-peer reviewed claims are not particularly uncommon. This page lists many that have yet to be verified or debunked:

http://www.win.tue.nl/~gwoegi/P-versus-NP.htm

Sadly, it seems many (most?) mathematicians do not want to even bother looking at claims made by people not already known to be experts in the area.

http://www.wisdom.weizmann.ac.il/~oded/p-vs-np.html

It is too bad, but I imagine no one will bother verifying or debunking this.

edit: as pointed out above, he references wikipedia. I take that back about it being too bad no one will ever look at this. Not to offend, but citing sources is basic research practice in any area.

arXiv is always fairly suspect; anyone can submit to it without peer review if I understand it correctly.

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