## Archive for the ‘polymath9’ Category

### DBD2 — success of a kind

January 9, 2014

Yesterday, as I was walking to my office in the morning, I planned to write a post in which I was going to say that Polymath9 had basically been a failure, though not a failure I minded about, since it hadn’t had any significant negative consequences. Part of the reason I wanted to say that was that for a few weeks I’ve been thinking about other things, and it seems better to “close” a project publicly than to leave it in a strange limbo.

When I got to my office, those other things I’ve been thinking about (the project with Mohan Ganesalingam on theorem proving) commanded my attention and the post didn’t get written. And then in the evening, with impeccable timing, Pavel Pudlak sent me an email with an observation that shows that one of the statements that I was hoping was false is in fact true: every subset of $\{0,1\}^n$ can be Ramsey lifted to a very simple subset of a not much larger set. (If you have forgotten these definitions, or never read them in the first place, I’ll recap them in a moment.)

How much of a disaster is this? Well, it’s never a disaster to learn that a statement you wanted to go one way in fact goes the other way. It may be disappointing, but it’s much better to know the truth than to waste time chasing a fantasy. Also, there can be far more to it than that. The effect of discovering that your hopes are dashed is often that you readjust your hopes. If you had a subgoal that you now realize is unachievable, but you still believe that the main goal might be achievable, then your options have been narrowed down in a potentially useful way.

Is that the case here? I’ll offer a few preliminary thoughts on that question and see whether they lead to an interesting discussion. If they don’t, that’s fine — my general attitude is that I’m happy to think about all this on my own, but that I’d be even happier to discuss it with other people. The subtitle of this post is supposed to reflect the fact that I have gained something from making my ideas public, in that Pavel’s observation, though simple enough to understand, is one that I might have taken a long, or even infinite, time to make if I had worked entirely privately. So he has potentially saved me a lot of time, and that is one of the main points of mathematics done in the open.
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### DBD1 — initial post

November 3, 2013

This post is intended as a launch of Polymath9. I have no idea how the project will go, but I think it may be rather short lived, since the difficulties I am having at the moment look as though they could turn out to be serious ones that rule out any approach along the lines I have been thinking about. However, it is difficult to say that with any certainty, because the approach is fairly flexible, so even if the precise statements I have been trying to prove are false, it might be possible to come up with variants that are true. In a way I find that a good state of affairs, because it increases the chances of proving something interesting. Obviously it increases the chances of proving that P$\ne$NP if one has more ways of attacking the problem. (I’m not claiming that it increases the probability to one that is not small — just that it increases it.) But it also increases the chances of what I would regard as a very nice consolation prize if, as expected, the approach does not work, namely a new barrier to proving that P$\ne$NP. I don’t think it would be as fundamental a barrier as the three main barriers discovered so far, since it would not be showing that existing methods cannot work. Rather, it would be saying, “Here’s something we could try. Oh dear, it doesn’t work.” But as long as that something was reasonably general, I think its failure to work could be interesting enough to publish.

I’ve thought a little about what phrase to attach to the project (the equivalent of “density Hales-Jewett” or “Erdős discrepancy problem”). I don’t want to call it “P versus NP” because that is misleading: the project I have in mind is much more specific than that. It is to assess whether there is any possibility of proving complexity lower bounds by drawing inspiration from Martin’s proof of Borel determinacy. Only if the answer turned out to be yes, which for various reasons seems unlikely at the moment, would it be reasonable to think of this as a genuine attack on the P versus NP problem. So the phrase I’ve gone for is “discretized Borel determinacy”. That’s what DBD stands for above. It’s not a perfect description, but it will do.
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### What I did in my summer holidays

October 24, 2013

This post is intended to accomplish several things at once. First and foremost, I want to explain (not just in the post) why I have been interested in Borel determinacy and in the natural proofs barrier. Roughly speaking (or should I say tl;dr?) I think that Martin’s proof of Borel determinacy has features that might just conceivably offer a way past that barrier.

As long-term readers of this blog will be aware, the P versus NP problem is one of my personal mathematical diseases (in Richard Lipton’s sense). I had been in remission for a few years, but last academic year I set a Cambridge Part III essay on barriers in complexity theory, and after marking the essays in June I thought I would just spend an hour or two thinking about the problem again, and that hour or two accidentally turned into about three months (and counting).

The trouble was that I had an idea that has refused to die, despite my best efforts to kill it. Like a particularly awkward virus, it has accomplished this by mutating rapidly, so that what it looks like now is very different from what it looked like at the beginning of the summer. (For example, at that stage I hadn’t thought of trying to model a proof on the proof of Borel determinacy.) So what am I to do?
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