Re: Feynman’s quote: why in the dickens aren’t large outstanding problems summarized this way? This seems like a great way to generate angles of attack, in Hamming’s sense of the term. It feels intuitively like being able to describe why a given approach from this list wouldn’t work would by itself be substantial progress on a given problem.
Hm. I’m reminded of my college class on Complexity Theory, where the professor explained some common strategies that have been widely successful in proving that two complexity classes either are or aren’t the same, and then went on to prove that those strategies could not be used to solve P vs NP.
That gave me a whole new appreciation for the difficulty of the problem, and how hard people have worked on it.
Re: Feynman’s quote: why in the dickens aren’t large outstanding problems summarized this way? This seems like a great way to generate angles of attack, in Hamming’s sense of the term. It feels intuitively like being able to describe why a given approach from this list wouldn’t work would by itself be substantial progress on a given problem.
Hm. I’m reminded of my college class on Complexity Theory, where the professor explained some common strategies that have been widely successful in proving that two complexity classes either are or aren’t the same, and then went on to prove that those strategies could not be used to solve P vs NP.
That gave me a whole new appreciation for the difficulty of the problem, and how hard people have worked on it.