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?"
well, (Score:3, Interesting)
(sorry about the bad spelling)
well I'm completely unqualified in every sense for these things, but being a political scientist I should be able to have a stab at the last question... Concordat's jury theorum suggests that with more people your chance of getting a right answer increases, say if everyone has about 60% chance of getting it right for example then with a few hundered people that chance should have increased to over 80%... which would lead me to believe yes it will work, still, i tend to think that the more people you have the less productive you are capable of being as people will disagree, and if the two most experienced people disagree then it could polarise the views of the less experienced people and split the project... so basically, it could go either way...
Monkeys (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Not a unique idea... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd agree, with two caveats: this project might attract some math prodigy that isn't working on these problems (Ramanujan, anyone?). Also, this project will help a lot of people learn how to think about the most abstract parts of mathematics.
The possibility of either result would justify this project in my eyes.
Let's not forget... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Please. . . (Score:3, Interesting)
In short, no-one needs to be annoyed if it's done right.
I remember... (Score:5, Interesting)
He told me that if he he solved the problem by showing P=NP (instead of P!=NP, which "most mathematicians believe"), he wouldn't publish his proof. Instead, he would setup a website that would take credit card payments to solve problems quickly (for example, packing boxes into the back of a UPS truck, or various traveling salesman problems). At the time, I though this was a little antisocial, but not much more.
Later, when I had more mathematical training, I looked back on this and realized how revealing this attitude was: of course, if someone proves P=NP, the proof will almost certainly not be accompanied by practical algorithms which are significantly better than those used already for problems on most scales. Of course, the idea that he was going to solve this problem without any collaboration or formal education in logic or complexity theory demonstrated the arrogance typical of many super-successful business-people. I can't help but remark that for all the stupid patents on software "ideas" and sometimes algorithms, we're lucky that, most of the time, theoretical advances are made not by people like this... and and so people publish their results, and are rewarded with respect rather than dollars.
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. Unfortunately, this is already largely the state of things in the wet sciences (unnecessarily so, I would argue, and point to mathematics as my evidence).
As for the wiki thing: I don't think most ordinary people are like this guy, so hey, good for the wiki. (I think this attitude is taught by the business world, and not somehow the other way around). Unfortunately, I fear that the millenium problems are deep enough that amateurs will have trouble making a big impact. There are a few amateur contributions to mathematics occasionally, but there hasn't been a significant one in a long time. (The last was arguably by Marjorie Rice, a housewife who essentially resolved the question of the number of different ways to tile the plane with convex pentagons). Astronomy is probably the last big field where amateurs play a really significant role.
Re:Ramanujan (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:They could contribute (Score:3, Interesting)
That's an excellent idea, and I can see how that this could be an incredible tool for researchers. Ideally, whenever someone has a paper published, they would put a statement of the results into such a wiki. (Ideally the proof would also be included, but copyrights might cause some problems there.) Each lemma or theorem would then have its own database item, with a field telling the publication that contains the result.
A tool like this could serve much the same purpose as MathSciNet, but I think it would be more useful since the database items would be individual lemmas and theorems, which would make it easier to find an intermediate result that didn't make it into a paper's abstract. It would probably make sense for there to be separate wikis for different subdisciplines.