Quite honestly, I'm surprised this didn't cause some sort of panic...

That's more of an adblock-equivalent, and I found it lacking when I first tried it (I don't remember my specific complaints, and it may have gotten better). The more direct noscript-equivalent is "NotScripts", which is quite simple and works pretty nicely.

Indeed, I was shooting from the hip a bit. I didn't mean to argue that integer factorization *cannot* be NP-complete, in the same way that I wouldn't argue that NP != PH or P != NP. However, among experts in the field, it's generally expected (not known, not proven) that all those things are true. When I said it would be "surprising", I meant that many well-informed people would be surprised. I like using words to mean what they mean.

Basically, yes, it is possible that P = NP = CoNP = PH, but it's reasonable in many contexts to assume otherwise.

As for NP=CoNP implying NP=PH, that was actually out of my notes for a computational complexity course I took. There's a proof in these lecture notes under Theorem 3 (not the course I took, and I haven't checked the proof in detail, but it looks about right).

That reinforces my point, though :)

If they get quantum computers to work at a useful scale, they'll be near useless for communication (both because they're so expensive and because of the networking problems you mentioned), but will be great for breaking all the encryption that everyone else uses around the world. In short, we need a classical cryptography scheme that's still secure with quantum computing.

That's true, but it's a pretty safe assumption. Integer factorization has been proven to be in both NP and CoNP, so if it's NP-complete that would mean that NP=CoNP. This, in turn, would imply that NP=PH. This would be, suffice it to say, very surprising.

Can you point me toward more information on this? I haven't heard anything like that before -- all arguments I've seen that say quantum computing breaks cryptographic schemes are just based on Shor's algorithm, which I didn't think had such broad implications. (I didn't know it breaks ECC, too.)

Yeah, I didn't know about ECC also being vulnerable (I learned something, too!). The problem with using QKD is that it requires all involved parties to be on a network of quantum computers. The biggest danger I see is when a few people (like the NSA) have quantum computers, but no one else does. If there aren't classical public-key schemes that can stand up to quantum computing, then security as we know it is basically broken, and anyone who wants a real guarantee of privacy will have to resort to one-time pads.

Yeah, that's true.

Wait, who didn't know this already? The title is misleading, but the fact that quantum computing breaks RSA is pretty standard knowledge (among people who have heard of quantum computing at all, I guess). Of course, there are other encryption schemes that seem to work just fine (e.g. Elliptic curve cryptography) with quantum computing, and there's not much evidence that algorithms other than RSA are broken. Note: factoring isn't NP-complete! So far there's no reason to believe it's not an "easy" problem, except that we haven't figured out how to do it. More intersetingly, there's a lot of research being done on quantum cryptography, which is really quite cool. In total, quantum computing should probably give us more security than it breaks, except for the idiots who keep using outdated algorithms long after they're broken, but they'd be screwed anyway.

So, the sky is falling! Oh wait, no, that's just the weather changing.

Apparently someone at google labs is a fan of the whole "pirates prevent global warming" joke: http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=pirates%2Cninjas&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=0&smoothing=3

...have you ever watched Jeopardy? If Watson buzzes in first on every question and gets 50% of them right, it'll end up somewhere around $0. If it gets a question wrong, it loses money and the other two contestants have a chance to buzz in to answer the question. If the programmers are confident it can get enough questions right for "buzz in on every question" to be a winning strategy, then yeah, it'll win. But if it's that accurate, well, mission accomplished.

You realize we (as in the human race) are really far away from fully emulating ourselves, right? Nobody involved in this project or anything related to the field is fooling themselves into thinking we've developed human-level AI.

In short: human-level AI is really really hard. That the state of the art isn't there yet doesn't mean making improvements isn't a challenge, or that it isn't interesting research.

Um... yeah? That's been pretty clear from the beginning. This is a feat of natural language processing (within pretty well-defined constraints) and information retrieval more than anything else. Who said otherwise?

Watson has some advantages, the humans have some advantages. Why is this a problem?

Asking whether it's allowed to use an archived (or, more likely, well-indexed) copy of wikipedia is like asking whether the human contestants are allowed to remember something they read on wikipedia. There's no question that computers can store more information than humans; that's not what this is testing, and it's probably a fair guess that "Watson" will have the answer to most every question asked. The hard part, however, is parsing the clues and understanding what they're looking for with a reasonable degree of accuracy, and doing so faster than the human contestants. Humans are great at this sort of thing, and it's really hard to write a program that does it at all well.