Timeline for The most outrageous (or ridiculous) conjectures in mathematics
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
26 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Mar 25, 2021 at 18:56 | comment | added | Ralph Furman | Agreed about P=PSPACE being the outrageous one. Essentially, if you're not constrained by memory then you're also not constrained by time :) | |
| Jun 15, 2020 at 7:27 | history | edited | CommunityBot |
Commonmark migration
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| Nov 29, 2019 at 8:54 | comment | added | none | I'd say P=PSPACE is even more outrageous than P=NP. It's still outrageous even if we assume P=NP is true. | |
| Sep 13, 2018 at 3:39 | history | edited | Robert Furber | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
Fixed grammatical mistake, and properly signalled the addition of words to the quotation by setting them off in square brackets (none of those words, even before the edit, are in Aaronson's blog post)
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| May 23, 2017 at 12:37 | history | edited | CommunityBot |
replaced http://stackoverflow.com/ with https://stackoverflow.com/
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| Apr 23, 2017 at 17:55 | comment | added | Red Banana | Again, quoting Scott: "It is important for it to be false due to the passionate appreciation of my self-proclamation of superiority, and also, others' proclamations I have made too! Jesus, If this is true, I'll have to accept that I and my beloved crushes are memberes of the plebe like anyone else. Scary! :'(" #FirstOrderProblems | |
| Jan 21, 2017 at 20:26 | history | edited | Mike Pierce | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
Just cleaned
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| Jan 20, 2017 at 18:38 | comment | added | Timothy Chow | @AshleyMontanaro : No, I picked my example to be just outside what Williams was able to prove. ACC circuits have constant depth, not logarithmic depth. | |
| Jan 20, 2017 at 7:44 | comment | added | Ashley Montanaro | @TimothyChow: I think this possibility was ruled out recently by Ryan Williams' breakthrough result. But there are many other, only slightly less ridiculous, possible complexity class equalities to choose from. | |
| Jan 19, 2017 at 22:33 | comment | added | Simd | 1. and 4. are completely unsupported by any evidence. They are just hyperbole . | |
| Jan 18, 2017 at 16:23 | comment | added | Timothy Chow | There are much better examples from complexity theory if we allow this kind of thing. For example: "NEXP-complete problems are solvable by logarithmic depth, polynomial-size circuits consisting entirely of mod 6 gates." This is a far more dramatic illustration of our inability to prove lower bounds. | |
| Jan 18, 2017 at 15:17 | comment | added | Nat | Some engineer out there has solved P=NP and it's locked up in an electric eggbeater calibration routine. | |
| Jan 18, 2017 at 6:33 | comment | added | bjd2385 | @CarloBeenakker Thank God science and mathematics aren't Democratic. | |
| Jan 18, 2017 at 3:12 | comment | added | R.. GitHub STOP HELPING ICE | Fails #5. It's the negation of the almost-certainly-true $P \neq NP$ | |
| Jan 17, 2017 at 23:41 | comment | added | user44143 | Indeed, if the answer indicated ideas from Aaronson's reasons 3,6,7 instead I would probably upvote it. | |
| Jan 17, 2017 at 23:24 | comment | added | Joel David Hamkins | Without taking a stand on P vs. NP, I support the hyperbolic comments. They seem to be right on, in the metaphorical sense in which they are offered. The consequences in 4 are meant for those who consider the truly large numbers. If one is small-minded, one might miss the essence of the natural numbers. | |
| Jan 17, 2017 at 22:55 | comment | added | Carlo Beenakker | @MattF. -- in all fairness to Scott Aaronson, I took just one of his 10 reasons to believe $P!=NP$, and he calls this particular reason the "philosophical argument"; there are 9 more. | |
| Jan 17, 2017 at 22:51 | comment | added | user44143 | I am downvoting in disagreement with Aaronson's hyperbolic comments. If every NP algorithm is in P but with much larger time bounds, then the consequences in 4 don't follow. And the world often is profoundly different than people assume: I don't want to declare assumptions likely simply because they're strongly held. | |
| Jan 17, 2017 at 22:35 | comment | added | Daniel R. Collins | @KevinBuzzard: Dick Lipton's "P = NP" blog is broadly devoted (or at least, a frequent point of discussion) to speculating that this is true. | |
| Jan 17, 2017 at 21:05 | history | made wiki | Post Made Community Wiki by Todd Trimble | ||
| Jan 17, 2017 at 20:14 | history | edited | Carlo Beenakker | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
added 10 characters in body
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| Jan 17, 2017 at 20:09 | comment | added | Carlo Beenakker | @KevinBuzzard -- "In a 2002 poll of 100 researchers, 9 believed the answer to be yes" (from Wikipedia, with this link to the poll) | |
| Jan 17, 2017 at 20:08 | comment | added | Kevin Buzzard | Was it ever believed to be true I wonder? I get the impression that nowadays you are hard pressed to find anyone who believes it. Some might hence argue that it is actually the negation of a well-known conjecture, namely that P isn't NP. (posted before I saw Gil's comment) | |
| Jan 17, 2017 at 20:08 | comment | added | Gil Kalai | Dear Carlo, I wanted to avoid "just the negation of a famous commonly believed conjecture" . (So while an equality it violates my condition 5 as I saw it :) ) But I still +1 it. | |
| Jan 17, 2017 at 20:05 | history | edited | Carlo Beenakker | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
added 25 characters in body
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| Jan 17, 2017 at 20:00 | history | answered | Carlo Beenakker | CC BY-SA 3.0 |