Want to Take On An Open/Unsolved Problem? 276
CexpTretical writes "The accumulation and focusing of knowledge may be the noblest use or purpose of the internet. There are plenty of open or unsolved problems left for this generation. Why not spend some of your time in the dark of this winter working on one of the big problems facing humanity? Open problems exists in almost every field of study. Wikipedia maintains a small list of them and at least one international group called the Union of International Associations maintains a database of open problems." Which problem do you want to see cracked first? Are you already working on one of these big issues?
One of the problems taken from wikipedia in econ. (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, good luck using the internet discussions to solve THAT problem.....
I read it on the internet (Score:5, Funny)
It does seem to be an out-of-control problem. According to wikipedia, the size and scope of the government has tripled in the last six months.
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Re:I read it on the internet (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:One of the problems taken from wikipedia in eco (Score:5, Interesting)
It's also the hardest because it's extremely difficult to perform a scientific experiment to test it. There are millions of variables to control, and uncontrollable, and you can't grab X governments at random and make them do something, dividing them neatly into control and test groups. (That's why it's hard for people to come to agreement about the matter.)
Could MMORPG's and realistic computer models of human economic behavior change this? Maybe.
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It's also the hardest because it's extremely difficult to perform a scientific experiment to test it. There are millions of variables to control, and uncontrollable, and you can't grab X governments at random and make them do something, dividing them neatly into control and test groups. (That's why it's hard for people to come to agreement about the matter.)
Could MMORPG's and realistic computer models of human economic behavior change this? Maybe.
Perhaps "Jennifer Government: NationStates"?
http://www.nationstates.net/ [nationstates.net]
Re:One of the problems taken from wikipedia in eco (Score:4, Interesting)
*I don't want to say "money", because what's important is what the money lays a claim to. You seem to be equating money with wealth, which is emphatically not the case. Wealth is what people value; money is an intermediate good in the exchange of wealth. You can easily create more money, but you can not easily create the value of the things it lays claim to. Having the right political/economic system is what I believe would have the largest long term wealth on the ability to provide wealth -- the things people value.
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It seems like all you have to offer is your opinion that, "aha!!!! I found something whose discovery time can't be shortene
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A non-mathematician has no shot at proving FLT or Poincare or the Riemann hypothesis.
I think the point is that with super-abundant resources, there would simply be more mathematicians. At present, intelligent people who would have a shot are going into fields like business, law, accountancy - fields where they can make money now. Maths can't compete with the salaries here, and unless you prove one of the dozen problems with a giant award waiting, you're not going to be a millionaire.
If resources wer
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Easy (Score:5, Funny)
No larger than necessary
In places where unrestricted market forces are detrimental
No
Yes
In a way that maximizes overall social wellbeing
To the extent that it ceases to be harmful to the overall health of society
Not "easy" but "facile". (Score:4, Insightful)
I can't believe that got modded "Informative" when the exact opposite is true. People, "Informative" does not mean "echoing my own beliefs".
Let's just look at the first empty thing said:
No larger than necessary
That's a pointless truism. In this context, proper=necessary. So, you have essentially said that the proper size is the proper size, giving zero information. Even a fascist believes that the state shouldn't be larger than necessary — they just believe that a totalitarian police state is necessary for order.
Perhaps if someone asks you what size USB connector is the proper one to go in a certain digital camera you will answer "One no larger or smaller than necessary". What a way to avoid answering a question whilst convincing airheads that you have done so!
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Wait, so is it true or false?
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Actually, it's almost Zen like. Too bad there's no "+1 "Zen" modifier"
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Presumably he's a wavering anarchist.
HTH.
Justin the logician.
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That's easy. It's the government that maximizes the probability of human survival.
If there is more than one maxima, it is the one that maximizes human achievement.
If there are still multiple solutions, it is the one that maximizes human happiness.
Finally, pick the smallest government that will accomplish this.
Now you only have to solve for survival, achievement, and happiness.
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Yes, I have a solution! (Score:3, Funny)
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What we need here is for a troll to post one of those good old-fashioned page-widening posts.
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-A mathematics grad student
The ultimate problems? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:The ultimate problems? (Score:4, Funny)
To which I'd add, why do tornadoes only touch down in trailer parks?
BTW, the socks one I can answer: They travel through wormholes and emerge in the back of the closet as spare hangers.
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I discovered that the day a repair guy came home to fix the washer as he found in the barrel of the washer several socks I had thought lost in the twilight zone forever.
But these days people just trash their broken washer and buy a new one, so this se
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Why can't I fill up the entire toilet with bubbles?
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I've given up on this and now, regularly buy socks weekly. I know the cost can be prohibitive, but if you wear them only once, you can get 5 pairs for under $5 if you look around.
There's no need to worry about quality, 'cause you only wear them once. There is no frustration because you know exactly where your socks are at all times - either in a shopping bag with sales tags on them, or in the bin.
There are other advantages that are too numerous to list here.
The way I manage to budget
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When I buy socks, I make sure to buy 10 or 20 pairs at a time, and if possible of a generic brand that will still be available when I need to buy socks again.
Then I don't care about correct pairing at all (almost: there are my socks, and those of my wife). Any two of mine will make a pair. Any one sock that is worn out is tossed (the other is kept), and any one sock that is lost is just a replacement for a half-pair...
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Forty-two is the answer to "What is six multiplied by nine?"
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=3
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People are too busy obsessing over how Smurfs reproduce than to worry about Gilligan's Island.
But, come to think of it... why DID so many space missions land there? And what was up with the WWII landing strip and abandoned bomber that they didn't notice until years had passed? How *do* you power a radio with coconuts?
And robots playing the Harlem Globetrotters? That's ridiculous... everyone knows robots can't jump.
Damn, well, there goes my da
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Ah, the dictionary is your friend for this one.
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=pant%20l e g [reference.com]
pant leg
-noun
a leg of a pair of pants.
Also called pant.
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I mean, it's not like I wake up in the morning, choose my right pant then choose my left pant.
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That happens because only dead skin absorbs external water and swells up. Hands and feet tend to be callused, where many layers of dead and dying skin have built up for protection.
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Why do we say "heads up" when we actually duck?
The other ones were kinda funny, but this one is just dumb. "Heads up" means raise your head up and look for the object heading toward you, perhaps from above. The proper defensive tactic may or may not be ducking -- it may be a quick lateral movement, it may diving under a safe spot, it may be covering your head with your arms, etc.
really? (Score:5, Funny)
That's your opinion. Midget porn afficionados would beg to differ.
First date! (Score:3, Funny)
How to get a date?
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How about somebody taking on the problem of ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously. The database sucked.
If I wanted to find a problem to tackle, just finding a good one is problem enough.
How about getting the problems
-listed by multiple tags
-filterable by area of interest, and skillset required
-prioritized by relevance to science, to humanity, to marketability
-sorted by difficulty, number of extant participants
If you can't communicate why something is a problem, then you have two problems.
Re:How about somebody taking on the problem of ... (Score:5, Funny)
Btw, I never knew there was a "Union of International Associations". Talk about bureaucracy! My friends and I used to joke about an imaginary, incompetent organication called the "Federal International Comission" (FIC), but man, did we miss the gold mine!
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"And what's under that?"
"Bureaucracy"
"and under that?"
"'Taint gonna fool me on this one... it's bureaucracy all the way down."
(Credit to Brad Warner)
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The "correct" way to list these problems is to have them easily searchable (as already said in parent post), but would then present a menu of different interpretations of what the problem actually is. Readers should be subject to exactly the amount of information they would find useful, neither
Re:How about somebody taking on the problem of ... (Score:5, Interesting)
If we knew enough about the problems to do all the categorizations you suggest, then we would be pretty well on the way to solving them. But you're right about the so-called "database" of problems maintained by the UIA. They seem to be missing a description of the problem in many cases. I guess they confuse a name with a description.
The Wikipedia list of unsolved problems [wikipedia.org] is categorized by the discipline of science that they are (apparently) most pertinent to. In some cases, the same problem is listed multiple times. I find it to be a nice set of problems, but curiously brief. If these are all of the big unsolved problems, then we have a distinct lack of imagination.
As to how one would go about ranking them as to difficulty, if you can do that even with problems that we know the answers to, you're a better man than I. In fact, I think that the question of how to rank problems by the difficulty they present is yet another unsolved problem. It very likely encompasses the framework of logic used to describe and solve the problem, with some problems that are quite simple in a sufficiently complex world-view being conundrums in a simpler world view.
Re:How about somebody taking on the problem of ... (Score:5, Informative)
This would be a better place to start:
http://arxiv.org/ [arxiv.org]
If you can't even understand the papers here in the field you've chosen, you've got a lot of work to do and it may even be easier to pursue it formally as part of a postgrad degree.
The myth that you can just walk into a problem and solve it is rubbish. Einstein may have been a patent clerk when he had his breakthrough "miracle" year but he was looking at problems for many many years and got to know a lot of mathematical and scientific literature in a less than formal setting which is one reason he was able to see past all the old thinking and realise that things he was seeing (notably the Lorentz transformations/Michelson-Morley experiment) were literally true.
Re:How about somebody taking on the problem of ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Einstein had a doctorate in physics, which included all of the grounding he needed to understand the problems of Brownian motion (for which he won the Nobel prize and which is to this day his most-cited work) and the issues with electro-dynamics that led him to relativity. He started with an excellent, formal, disciplined grounding in his subject of interest. His position as a patent clerk was useful because it gave him the time to work undisturbed by actual job duties (patent office employment back then not being much different from in our own time.)
While self-taught geniuses do exist (Ramanujan, for example) the vast majority of substantive contributions to any field are made by people with good formal grounding in that field. It doesn't matter how smart you are, nor how much of the literature you have read: formal education will help you learn the disciplines of mind and modes of thought that are the jumping-off point for new work. Nor does learning these things stifle creativity if you really understand them, as Einstein did.
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See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein#Works_and_do ctorate [wikipedia.org]
He certainly didn't wait until he had this formal education to think about relativity. He'd done most of the ground work years before. The setting was a much less formal one in which he started out with learning difficulties once fascinated by the mathematics largely taught himself and worked hard until he was outdoing his tutors.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E [wikipedia.org]
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now, with sepcial relativity, they are called the lorentz transforms because it had been found out long before 1905 that a different invariance is required for Maxwell's equations. Also, it was long known for Maxwell's equations that they predicted some universal speed for the propogations of
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Which problem do you want to see cracked first? (Score:2, Funny)
Adler likes to hum as he works, not too loudly, just enough to break thru the usual office background noise. That would be distracting enough, however, Adler insists on choosing his nasal-tunes by whatever the last audible ring tone was that blared thru our locality. The ring tone/tune sticks in his head, and he hums it over and over, out load, until the next tune gets stuck in his borderline consciousness...I mean tone...I mean...u
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object to definition of "Open Problem" (Score:4, Interesting)
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Sort of true, but in the situation you describe, a proof that no such algorithm exists (e.g. finding integer zeroes of multivariate polynomials -- provably undecidable IIRC, which is a bit surprising) would commonly be considered to "resolve" the open question, even though it wasn't maybe the particular resolution we would have preferred.
However, in most (nearly all?) cases, open problems are not nearly so poorly specified: often there is a definite answer even if (as you point out) there may theoreticall
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Other problems (particular the nonmathematical ones) aren't problems in all axiom sets/belief systems. For example, somewhere prostitution is listed as an open problem. But if you legalize prostitution, then you can apply the whole of modern legal infrastructure (eg, worker protection, how to hire/fire someone, workplace safety, etc) to it. It becomes a job rather than a problem.
A similar phenomena is that some problems are special cases of more general problems. Slavery should be (and usually is) illegal
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Semantics. In that situation, the problem is actually "Does a solution exist to this problem?" The Halting Problem wasn't "What Turing Machine will determine whether any another Turing Machine will halt or not?" The Halting Problem was "Does that Turing Machine exist? If so, what is it?" and the answer, the solution to the Halting Problem, is "No".
Try this at home (Score:5, Interesting)
* Some of you may recognize Sierpinski from the carpet [wikipedia.org] which bears his name.
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I swear this is not my homework (Score:5, Funny)
The factors for x^2 + 5x + 6 please, showing work.
Re:I swear this is not my homework (Score:5, Funny)
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If you don't want people to solve them in their heads, make the questions harder...
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Mod +1 - Me too
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http://www.purplemath.com/modules/quadform.htm [purplemath.com]
Distributed computing... (Score:4, Insightful)
Log into web site, check out work unit, complete unit, check in results, rinse and repeat.
There is an assumption in this sort of thing that there is a large enough untapped pool of relevant expertise to make this sort of job distribution effective. Is this actually just a study on whether or not that assumption is correct, or has someone really made that assumption and is expecting success?
I have troubles believing that this is really an effective means for tackling some of the listed problems.
oh, yeah, the Riemann hypothesis (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:I've been working on something similar, feedbac (Score:2, Funny)
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Choose a problem (Score:2)
This has to be one of the dumbest submissions to slashdot that I've seen in a while. Looking over the CS section of the problems (the only category I'm really qualified to review), I see 2 problems related to P=NP. Yes, this is a problem I'm going to solve in my spare time this winter. If the other fields problems look anything remotely like this one, good luck.
In all honesty, I don't think
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Actually if you look at almost every CS presentation in a seminar, it always ends with a page on unsolved problems and such. The problem with comp
union of international associations (Score:3, Funny)
They forgot one very very important problem needin (Score:5, Funny)
How to make reliable electronic voting machines.
The Gettier problem (Score:3, Interesting)
This seems to have something to do with the answer I sometimes give my son when he ask how to spell a word and I answer "With letters."
The problem looks to me to be one of degenerate labeling when passing by reference. Basically, if Smith wants to believe something about people with coins in their pockets he is getting the answer to the question: some people have applied for a job, will one of them get it? If you redirect by the number of coins in a pocket, but you have not checked that this is a unique label, then the question ends up meaning something other than you think it means. The statement about the man with ten coins getting the job is true for the same reason that "A or not A" is true. Regardless of coins, there is no knowledge about the answer to the apparent question (who will be offered the job) until the decision has been made, and since neither Smith nor Jones make that decision, thay can't know its outcome till they are told.
If anyone has worked on this I'd like to hear if this solution has already been discounted.
--
Power your bright ideas with solar: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-user
unsure what category to place my question (Score:2)
Obviously, the erroneously-reported answer of 'three' is in the public consciousness, but that was hardly determined by the scientific method.
Anyone here got experience in filling out government research grants? I'm willing to put in the time necessary to do the research, as long as I can get the funding.
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I've seen at least 500 separate tests of this hypothesis, all involving a wise old owl. adn the answer was always three. I mean, my god!!! sigma = 0.
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What is Music? (Score:2, Interesting)
Something about this title is familiar... (Score:2)
Sounds like every relationship I've ever been in. Sure, I'll give her a spin.
Re:What actually has to be done to solve problems? (Score:4, Funny)
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The proper thing to do is to manipulate it as
P=NP
P-NP=0
(1-N)P=0
=> P=0 or N=1
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A lot of people have wondered this (it's a fairly famous philosophical question), and I think the answer is... it's not a valid question to even ask. There's no such thing as "color", it's simply what we choose to name the signals that come from our eyes. It's like asking whether two people perceive the sensation of a needle prick versus a blunt strike in the same way. Do you percieve what I think of as a needle prick as a blunt strike? Of course not, because we've named the physical sensations as what they
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However, inside the mind, you're actually into linguistics - what is perception of "blue" other than seeing something that is blue? Well, "blue" is just a word, I could call blue "bleu" and green "v
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One example is a relational GUI system. Different widgets have different attributes. Either you make an entity for each widget, or you make the attributes dynamic. Existing RDBMS don't handle this problem very well, and that is perhaps why we have crap like DOM. If relational tools were more flexible, the