## Archive for September 3rd, 2010

### EDP18 — apparently P does not equal NP

September 3, 2010

The title of this post is meant to serve various purposes. First and foremost, it is a cheap trick designed to attract attention. Secondly, and relatedly, it is a nod to the amusing events of the last week or so. [Added later: they were from the last week or so when I wrote that sentence.] But there is a third reason that slightly excuses the first two, which is that the current state of play with the EDP project has a very P$\ne$NP-ish feel to it. Indeed, that has been the case for a while: we are trying to find a clever decomposition of a diagonal matrix, which is a difficult search problem, even though we can be fairly confident that if somebody came up with a good candidate for a decomposition, then checking that it worked would be straightforward. And just in case that is not true, let’s make it trivially true by saying that we are searching for a decomposition that can easily be checked to work. If it can easily be checked to work, then it can easily be checked that it can easily be checked to work (the algorithm being to try to check it and see whether you succeed). But now I want to air a suggestion that reduces the search problem to another one that has similar properties but may be easier.

A brief word also on why I am posting again on EDP despite the fact that we are nowhere near 100 comments on the previous post. The main reason is that, now that the rate of commenting has slowed to a trickle, it is far from clear that the same rules should apply. I think the 100-comment rule was a good sufficient condition for a new post, but now I think I want to add a couple more: if there is something to say and quite a long time has elapsed since the previous post, or if there is something to say that takes a while to explain and is not a direct continuation of the current discussion, then it seems a good idea to have a new post. And both these conditions apply.

[Added later: this is a rather strange post written over a few weeks during which my thoughts on the problem were constantly changing. So everything that I say, particularly early on, should be taken with a pinch of salt as I may contradict it later. One approach to reading the post might be to skim it, read the very end a bit more carefully, and then refer back to the earlier parts if you want to know where various ideas came from.]
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