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Pastimes : Current Events and General Interest Bits & Pieces
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To: Bilow who wrote (294)12/20/2002 10:33:59 PM
From: Win Smith   of 603
 
Thanks for looking up the paper, Carl. Not that the "ideas" stories are that reliable, as the scramjet story illustrated, but what Thompson wrote was that the algorithm was a half page, which is approximately true.

I dug up an old computation theory book, it cited a 1976 paper as presenting "strong evidence" (e.g. something short of a proof) that Primes was in P, so this result isn't totally unexpected. The big conjecture in computability was always P <> NP, and I assume that remains unproven. NP is nondeterministic polynomial time, which means, approximately, for the hardest problems in the class, that a solution can be verified in polynomial time but there's no efficient way to find a solution in the first place. Still, the primes thing was a well known problem and apparently an impressive piece of work.
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