Sure, but that’s just saying that P=NP is not a robust hypothesis. Conditional on P=NP, what odds do you put that P is not P^#P or PSPACE? (though maybe the first is a robust hypothesis that doesn’t cover BQP)
Conditional on P=NP, what odds do you put that P is not P^#P or PSPACE? (though maybe the first is a robust hypothesis that doesn’t cover BQP)
I’m not sure. If P=NP this means I’m drastically wrong about a lot of my estimates. Estimating how one would update conditioning on a low probability event is difficult because it means there will be something really surprising happening, so I’d have to look at how we proved that P=NP to see what the surprise ended up being. But, if that does turn out to be the case, I’m fairly confident I’d then assign a pretty high probability to P=PSPACE. On the other hand we know that of the inequalities between P, NP, PSPACE and EXP, at least one of them needs to be strict. So why should I then expect it to be strict on that end? Maybe I should then believe that PSPACE=EXP? PSPACE feels closer to P than to EXP but that’s just a rough feeling, and we’re operating under the hypothetical that we find out that a major intuition in this area is wrong.
Sure, but that’s just saying that P=NP is not a robust hypothesis. Conditional on P=NP, what odds do you put that P is not P^#P or PSPACE? (though maybe the first is a robust hypothesis that doesn’t cover BQP)
I’m not sure. If P=NP this means I’m drastically wrong about a lot of my estimates. Estimating how one would update conditioning on a low probability event is difficult because it means there will be something really surprising happening, so I’d have to look at how we proved that P=NP to see what the surprise ended up being. But, if that does turn out to be the case, I’m fairly confident I’d then assign a pretty high probability to P=PSPACE. On the other hand we know that of the inequalities between P, NP, PSPACE and EXP, at least one of them needs to be strict. So why should I then expect it to be strict on that end? Maybe I should then believe that PSPACE=EXP? PSPACE feels closer to P than to EXP but that’s just a rough feeling, and we’re operating under the hypothetical that we find out that a major intuition in this area is wrong.