Wiki to Help Solve Millennium Problems? 232
MattWhitworth writes "A new wiki has been set up over at QEDen to try to gather a community to solve the Millennium Problems. The problems are seven as yet unsolved mathematical problems that continue to vex researchers today. What do you think of this effort? Will gathering a community of people help solve problems such as P=NP, or do you think it requires a lot more than a semi-qualified community to approach the problem?"
Please. . . (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Please. . . (Score:5, Insightful)
GIGO.
The quantity of GI does not effect the reality of GO.
The very few people who actually do understand the problems and the underlying issues will eventually stop trying to explain what the real issue is.
One very quickly learns the pointlessness of trying to explain to the Unskilled and Unaware of It that it would take about two years of education for them to even understand that they don't understand the issue.
And it only annoys the pig.
KFG
In related news... (Score:5, Insightful)
Lets put it this way, if there was a Wiki on solving complex DNA evolution problems, 50%+ of the posts would be from wackos talking about ID and Creationism.
I hate to break it to people, but Maths and Physics make computing look like a liberal arts degree.
Motivation? (Score:3, Insightful)
Noble endavor (Score:2, Insightful)
However by involving everyone, including the layman in these fascinating problems will help increase appreciation for the beauty of mathematics amongst the general public and that to me is equal in worth to actually solving these problems.
I doubt it will work (Score:5, Insightful)
But then, more people working on it doesn't necessarily improve things. For one, you will expect a very bad noise to signal ratio, where there would be a bunch of smart ass ideas that have already been disproved decades ago, or ideas which are so obviously wrong that no academic would even think of writing a paper for.
Basically the whole thing is based on the assumption that "monkeys banging on typewriters will eventually produce all the works of shakespear". It works in theory, but remember that it takes either an infinite number of monkeys, or infinite time -- whereas you could find a group of talented people to do the same job more effectively.
Expect a dozen claims of "TSP solved in P time!" from this site within a month, and nothing more afterwards.
I don't think so, no.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Will gathering a community of people help solve problems such as P=NP, or do you think it requires a lot more than a semi-qualified community to approach the problem?
Proofs are not really found by committee. This Wiki might be a good way to share research and in that sense it may aid the effort but above and beyond that it's not going to contribute much.
It will take a unique insight and a particularly sharp mind to get to the bottom of these problems.
Simon
Re:well, (Score:3, Insightful)
I would think, and this is just a guess, that the qualified pool of people working on those problems is already nearly maxed out. Adding a bunch of folks that don't even 'speak the language,' as another poster mentioned, probably won't increase the odds of a solution very well.
solid approach (Score:5, Insightful)
Not a unique idea... (Score:5, Insightful)
The important difference there was that this project was only open to those actually actively involved in working on this problem. A public wiki will likely be bogged down by people who don't truly understand the problem or the approaches used to solve them - instead of everyone being able to contribute a little (as is possible in Wikipedia, which effectively just requires a transcription of information) the vast majority of people won't have anything to offer at all. And of course, those that are actively involved in working on these projects and want to share their work are in all likihood already doing so - with other people in the same field.
This project will likely attract those who do not have the particlar interest, time or background to work in a focused fashion on the problem, and consequently I'd be surprised if anything really unique or surprising came out of the project.
They could contribute (Score:5, Insightful)
Real researchers are familiar with cranks on newsgroups (James S Harris on sci.math for example) who year in year out claim to have proved this or that famous conjecture. Or, these people send proofs to real researchers, expecting attention when page one of their "proof" contains an error. So my hopes are not high that a community of semi-qualified people could solve the problems, but....
Suppose that this community set about collating and putting in context all of the material related to those problems that exists in the **research level** literature and **expounding** it in an extremely clear way. And suppose that real researchers were interested and joined the effort. This resource could be a HUGE contribution to the effort.
Unfortunately, the only joint efforts in mathematics on the web so far, do not deal seriously with the literature, but approach mathematics at a level of understanding of a first year graduate student. Problems that are well understood by the most brilliant minds on the planet are not going to be solved by people with an understanding as limited as that. It isn't as though some tough problems haven't been solved with elementary methods (the Kayal-Agrawal-Saxena result being a case in point), nor is it true that cranks do not occasionally come up with the goods (de Branges proof of the Bieberbach conjecture being a case in point), but the fact is, these are exceptions to the rule and the vast majority of difficult problems had immensely difficult solutions which took new developments in mathematics over periods of many years before they could be solved. Will a community of non-researchers make developments in modern mathematics? Personally I doubt it.
But, this is a new idea, hasn't been tried, so who knows where it will lead. As a research mathematician, the idea intrests me, and I would be involved if it headed in the right direction and didn't become a place for cranks to meet and fiddle with polynomials over an unspecified ring.
Re:Please. . . (Score:5, Insightful)
--Kurt Vonnegut in Cat's Cradle
Would you not say there is quite a difference from explaining what you are doing to an 8 year old child and giving sufficient information to expect that child to contribute to the work?
For example, I study reaction dynamics and intramolecular energy flow during 'fast' reactions. It is pretty easy for me to explain to children that I study chemical reactions - how things are changed from one thing to another. I could even do some demo's and talk about them in some detail.
But that's a far cry from expecting those children from being able to help me solve Navier-Stokes equations, apply classical thermodynamics, statistical mechanics and quantum mechanics to arrive at quantitative models of deflagration explosions.
Why share the credit? (Score:3, Insightful)
Personally, I don't think the wiki will do any good. Good collaboration requires face-to-face contact. Anything else is really equivalent to the modern email/conference/preprint system in math. After all, who wants to share their million-dollar insight on a wiki only to get scooped? Double-plus-ungood: how do you decide which researcher did the critical part of the problem? It's tough to say now (and mostly irrelevant, but intellectual pissing matches have been with math since at leave Liebnitz vs. Newton), and it would be harder to decide in the mixed-up collaborative world of the wiki.
While there are critics (Score:3, Insightful)
So, jokes and criticism aside, the OST (open source thinking) is a good plan. Execution may have some drawbacks, but it has goodness in it.
Re:Please. . . (Score:3, Insightful)
Have you ever seen any of the threads which pop up on some forums now and again attempting to convince people that 0.9 recurring is equal to 1? It's true, but it's unintuitive - and consequently, people tend to persistently reject the idea, even with varying degrees of proof (from the 1/3 = 0.3 recurring argument, to the demonstration that it follows directly as a result of constructing the set of reals).
Such is the case with most ideas in the sciences - things often contradict what we expect, and people tend to reject them, until they have studied the field enough to see why the arguments leading to them are valid. Heck, even Newton's laws don't line up directly with our everyday experiences until we understand enough to compensate for things like air resistance.
Ramanujan (Score:5, Insightful)
A lot of people on Slashdot are degree-obsessed; at an early age they have bought into the idea that everybody who does not have a formal academic education to at least PhD level is necessarily unable to contribute anything to research. (This is not just the chip on my shoulder talking, but as someone with a degree from Fen Poly who has recruited a fair number of graduates over the years, I know it takes far more than a degree or two to make a scientist, mathematician or even a developer. Curiosity, persistence, the ability to see connections are all important.) Although this Wiki may well fail, it might just bring to light a few more Ramanujans. The world does not consist solely of North Americans, and there are doubtless plenty of educated people in other cultures who do not have access to the networks that bring some people to the fore while others, equally well endowed, may never get an opportunity.
Insight Required (Score:5, Insightful)
These problems are all incredibly difficult. A lot of very good mathematicians have thought about them, in some cases for over a hundred years. In some cases, even understanding the problem requires an advanced mathematical education. If there was anything approaching an easy solution, it would have been found already. That said
Problems like these always require some insight. Typically, either a way to relate the problem to some other unexpected area, or some new kind of machinery that creates a leverage against the problem.
Personally, I wouldn't expect that from such an effort.
Re:Please. . . (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:In related news... (Score:2, Insightful)
Check out real colleges with real majors and programs, and you will see a lot of courses that connect math and computers. A lot may be taught only in Math departments, but these classes will often be listed as being for CS majors. Do you think that they make real CS majors take as much math as they do for fun?
Re: Meanwhile... (Score:3, Insightful)
This analogy is quite flawed. Whereas discussion of theoretical problems can lead to the solution itself, discussion of practical issues can only be a small part of their solution, and is followed by the actual solving, which is a seperate act.
Add in the fact that he's implying that the wiki is being touted as the solution, and the total incomparability of development goals vs mathematics problems ("solve"?), and it starts to become clear that the only reason this isn't already at -1 is that it contains the word "millenium" maintaining a veneer of relevance.
Re:I remember... (Score:3, Insightful)
And your entire post underlines one for me. Believe it or not, the academic world is full of plenty of people just like your friend. Just as plenty of complex mathematical problems are solved (and published) by those in the business world. This isn't a business vs academia thing, this is just an example of an arrogant hack.
"Imagine the state of our theoretical knowledge in mathematics and computer science if, even in Academia, every discovery of a new algorithm or idea resulted in a patent application, and was jealously guarded as a secret which could produce profit."
No, thats not how patents work. Patents don't get jealously guarded as secrets, they are published. The whole point of patents is to encourage people to publish things instead of keeping them as trade secrets. Besides, most developments that could be considered theoretical would get published anyways, even by the 'evil' profit hungry corporations. Patents are generally used for more practical developments, simply because companies wouldn't really benefit at all from patenting a purely theoretical development.