That is indeed evidence against his credibility, if not particularly strong evidence for me. I don’t know enough math to know directly that saying P=NP is a joke; I only believe it is because the math community says so.
Merely saying it wouldn’t be so bad, as long as there was some substance behind the assertion.
But basically his argument boils down to this:
“If you dunk two wooden boards with wires poked through them into soapy water and then lift them out, the soaps films between the wires are the solution to an NP-hard problem. But creating the boards and wires and dunking them can be done in polynomial time. So as long as physics is Turing computable, P = NP.”
This is a fantastically stupid argument, because you could easily create a simulation of the above process that appeared to be just as good at generating the answers to this problem as the real soap films. But if you gave it a somewhat difficult problem, what would happen is that it would quickly generate something which was nearly but not quite a solution, and there’s no reason to think that real soap films would do better.
The fact that Bringsjord got as far as formalising his argument in modal logic and writing it up, without even thinking of the above objection, is quite incredible.
So far as I understand your comment, Bringsjord loses a lot of credibility. Thanks for explaining his argument from behind the paywall in your link. Also I looked at more of his paper on Singularitarians being fideists, and he says in the paper that there are arguments for the Singularity and he’s going to “debunk” them. I’m starting to think he doesn’t know what the word “fideist” means.
Yeah well, it’s Selmer P = NP Bringsjord. He’s a complete joke!
That is indeed evidence against his credibility, if not particularly strong evidence for me. I don’t know enough math to know directly that saying P=NP is a joke; I only believe it is because the math community says so.
Merely saying it wouldn’t be so bad, as long as there was some substance behind the assertion.
But basically his argument boils down to this:
“If you dunk two wooden boards with wires poked through them into soapy water and then lift them out, the soaps films between the wires are the solution to an NP-hard problem. But creating the boards and wires and dunking them can be done in polynomial time. So as long as physics is Turing computable, P = NP.”
This is a fantastically stupid argument, because you could easily create a simulation of the above process that appeared to be just as good at generating the answers to this problem as the real soap films. But if you gave it a somewhat difficult problem, what would happen is that it would quickly generate something which was nearly but not quite a solution, and there’s no reason to think that real soap films would do better.
The fact that Bringsjord got as far as formalising his argument in modal logic and writing it up, without even thinking of the above objection, is quite incredible.
So far as I understand your comment, Bringsjord loses a lot of credibility. Thanks for explaining his argument from behind the paywall in your link. Also I looked at more of his paper on Singularitarians being fideists, and he says in the paper that there are arguments for the Singularity and he’s going to “debunk” them. I’m starting to think he doesn’t know what the word “fideist” means.