Want to Take On An Open/Unsolved Problem?

CexpTretical writes "The accumulation and focusing of knowledge may be the noblest use or purpose of the internet. There are plenty of open or unsolved problems left for this generation. Why not spend some of your time in the dark of this winter working on one of the big problems facing humanity? Open problems exists in almost every field of study. Wikipedia maintains a small list of them and at least one international group called the Union of International Associations maintains a database of open problems." Which problem do you want to see cracked first? Are you already working on one of these big issues?

One of the problems taken from wikipedia in econ.

What is the proper size and scope of government? Where can government intervention improve on the market? Does a market failure necessarily mean that government intervention is warranted? Can intervention make things worse? If the government intervenes in a market, how should it intervene? To what extent is public ownership of assets and businesses warranted?

Yeah, good luck using the internet discussions to solve THAT problem.....

I read it on the internet

"What is the proper size and scope of government?" Yeah, good luck using the internet discussions to solve THAT problem.....

It does seem to be an out-of-control problem. According to wikipedia, the size and scope of the government has tripled in the last six months.

Re:I read it on the internet

Here!

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I see the problem. You're Here. This implies you're not in Congress. :P

Re:One of the problems taken from wikipedia in eco

Very funny, but I actually consider that the most important question of all, because if you know the answer to that, you can generate the wealth necessary to trivially solve all of the others. Look at all the nations of the world and observe what a huge difference the choice of government makes!

It's also the hardest because it's extremely difficult to perform a scientific experiment to test it. There are millions of variables to control, and uncontrollable, and you can't grab X governments at random and make them do something, dividing them neatly into control and test groups. (That's why it's hard for people to come to agreement about the matter.)

Could MMORPG's and realistic computer models of human economic behavior change this? Maybe.

Re:One of the problems taken from wikipedia in eco

"Trivial" might have been an exaggeration, but the point remains: if economic resources are nearly superabundant, you can devote a lot more people to tasks like proving mathematical theorems, and more importantly, you will have better mathematical training. It's true that you don't really need lots of economic resources* to prove Fermat's Last Theorem, as anyone can in theory, arrive at the answer. It just helps immensely.

*I don't want to say "money", because what's important is what the money lays a claim to. You seem to be equating money with wealth, which is emphatically not the case. Wealth is what people value; money is an intermediate good in the exchange of wealth. You can easily create more money, but you can not easily create the value of the things it lays claim to. Having the right political/economic system is what I believe would have the largest long term wealth on the ability to provide wealth -- the things people value.

Easy

• What is the proper size and scope of government?
  No larger than necessary
  
• Where can government intervention improve on the market?
  In places where unrestricted market forces are detrimental
  
• Does a market failure necessarily mean that government intervention is warranted?
  No
  
• Can intervention make things worse?
  Yes
  
• If the government intervenes in a market, how should it intervene?
  In a way that maximizes overall social wellbeing
  
• To what extent is public ownership of assets and businesses warranted?
  To the extent that it ceases to be harmful to the overall health of society

Not "easy" but "facile".

I can't believe that got modded "Informative" when the exact opposite is true. People, "Informative" does not mean "echoing my own beliefs".

Let's just look at the first empty thing said:

• What is the proper size and scope of government?
  No larger than necessary

That's a pointless truism. In this context, proper=necessary. So, you have essentially said that the proper size is the proper size, giving zero information. Even a fascist believes that the state shouldn't be larger than necessary — they just believe that a totalitarian police state is necessary for order.

Perhaps if someone asks you what size USB connector is the proper one to go in a certain digital camera you will answer "One no larger or smaller than necessary". What a way to avoid answering a question whilst convincing airheads that you have done so!

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What is the proper size and scope of government?

That's easy. It's the government that maximizes the probability of human survival.
If there is more than one maxima, it is the one that maximizes human achievement.
If there are still multiple solutions, it is

Yes, I have a solution!

I have a truly marvelous proof of this proposition however this comment is too narrow to contain.

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I have a truly marvelous proof of this proposition however this comment is too narrow to contain.

What we need here is for a troll to post one of those good old-fashioned page-widening posts.

The ultimate problems?

What questions I'd like to see answered? Where do socks go in the laundry? Why do people obsess about the incongruities in gilligan's island? Why do good things happen to people who aren't me? 42. (now find me the question)

Re:The ultimate problems?

"What questions I'd like to see answered? Where do socks go in the laundry? Why do people obsess about the incongruities in gilligan's island? Why do good things happen to people who aren't me? 42. (now find me the question)"

To which I'd add, why do tornadoes only touch down in trailer parks?

BTW, the socks one I can answer: They travel through wormholes and emerge in the back of the closet as spare hangers.

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Alternatively socks just get droped outside of the drum and end up in the bottom of the washer, either by the person puting them in the washer (top laders) or by crawling out of the drum thanks to the escape force created by the circular motion (front load

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One unsolved problem that has perplexed me for years:

Why can't I fill up the entire toilet with bubbles?

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Why are shorts, pants and underpants all referred to as pairs.. in fact they have no singular noun. You can have 1 Pair of shorts, 10 pairs of shorts.. but you can't have 1 short or 1 pant..

Ah, the dictionary is your friend for this one.
http://dictiona [reference.com]

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- How come only your fingers and toes get prune in the shower and nothing else does?

That happens because only dead skin absorbs external water and swells up. Hands and feet tend to be callused, where many layers of dead and dying skin have built up for

really?

The accumulation and focusing of knowledge may be the noblest use or purpose of the internet.

That's your opinion. Midget porn afficionados would beg to differ.

First date!

"Which problem do you want to see cracked first? "

How to get a date?

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Already been done [bbc.co.uk]. Ah, those game theorists!

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An engagement ring? That's all science can offer me? Maybe I should get into mathematics more and work on game theory applications to anonymous hookups... I could probably get a grant for that.

How about somebody taking on the problem of ...

how to list the world's problems.

Seriously. The database sucked.
If I wanted to find a problem to tackle, just finding a good one is problem enough.

How about getting the problems
-listed by multiple tags
-filterable by area of interest, and skillset required
-prioritized by relevance to science, to humanity, to marketability
-sorted by difficulty, number of extant participants

If you can't communicate why something is a problem, then you have two problems.

Re:How about somebody taking on the problem of ...

Also, it should give the current "closest" solutions to the problems, i.e., "Person A found that you can solve B as long as you know how to do a C on D."

Btw, I never knew there was a "Union of International Associations". Talk about bureaucracy! My friends and I used to joke about an imaginary, incompetent organication called the "Federal International Comission" (FIC), but man, did we miss the gold mine!

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I agree. I'd extend what you wrote just a little to make your last point stronger - finding the problem is not sufficient, if the problem is so badly phrased as to be a problem in understanding what the problem is.

The "correct" way to list these problems

Re:How about somebody taking on the problem of ...

"If you can't communicate why something is a problem, then you have two problems."

If we knew enough about the problems to do all the categorizations you suggest, then we would be pretty well on the way to solving them. But you're right about the so-called "database" of problems maintained by the UIA. They seem to be missing a description of the problem in many cases. I guess they confuse a name with a description.

The Wikipedia list of unsolved problems [wikipedia.org] is categorized by the discipline of science that they are (apparently) most pertinent to. In some cases, the same problem is listed multiple times. I find it to be a nice set of problems, but curiously brief. If these are all of the big unsolved problems, then we have a distinct lack of imagination.

As to how one would go about ranking them as to difficulty, if you can do that even with problems that we know the answers to, you're a better man than I. In fact, I think that the question of how to rank problems by the difficulty they present is yet another unsolved problem. It very likely encompasses the framework of logic used to describe and solve the problem, with some problems that are quite simple in a sufficiently complex world-view being conundrums in a simpler world view.

Re:How about somebody taking on the problem of ...

This kind of work is not something you take on by looking it up on a general encyclopaedia like Wikipedia. If you're at a point where you can actually make an attempt on such a problem, you're probably already familiar with specialist literature and you more likely than not have heard of the problem long ago and not yet tackled it.

This would be a better place to start:
http://arxiv.org/ [arxiv.org]

If you can't even understand the papers here in the field you've chosen, you've got a lot of work to do and it may even be easier to pursue it formally as part of a postgrad degree.

The myth that you can just walk into a problem and solve it is rubbish. Einstein may have been a patent clerk when he had his breakthrough "miracle" year but he was looking at problems for many many years and got to know a lot of mathematical and scientific literature in a less than formal setting which is one reason he was able to see past all the old thinking and realise that things he was seeing (notably the Lorentz transformations/Michelson-Morley experiment) were literally true.

Re:How about somebody taking on the problem of ...

Einstein may have been a patent clerk when he had his breakthrough "miracle" year but he was looking at problems for many many years and got to know a lot of mathematical and scientific literature in a less than formal setting

Einstein had a doctorate in physics, which included all of the grounding he needed to understand the problems of Brownian motion (for which he won the Nobel prize and which is to this day his most-cited work) and the issues with electro-dynamics that led him to relativity. He started with an excellent, formal, disciplined grounding in his subject of interest. His position as a patent clerk was useful because it gave him the time to work undisturbed by actual job duties (patent office employment back then not being much different from in our own time.)

While self-taught geniuses do exist (Ramanujan, for example) the vast majority of substantive contributions to any field are made by people with good formal grounding in that field. It doesn't matter how smart you are, nor how much of the literature you have read: formal education will help you learn the disciplines of mind and modes of thought that are the jumping-off point for new work. Nor does learning these things stifle creativity if you really understand them, as Einstein did.

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Actually he obtained his doctorate the same year he published his Annus Mirabilis papers
See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein#Works_and_do ctorate [wikipedia.org]

He certainly didn't wait until he had this formal education to think about relativity. He'd done most of t

Which problem do you want to see cracked first?

Well, if someone can do something about the guy in the cubicle next to me...

Adler likes to hum as he works, not too loudly, just enough to break thru the usual office background noise. That would be distracting enough, however, Adler insists on choosing hi

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Kidnap Adler on a dark night. Leave him tied up in a tunnel at the It's A Small World ride at Disneyland. Soon, his head will explode. Problem solved.

object to definition of "Open Problem"

from link in story [wikipedia.org]: "... for which a solution is known to exist but which has not yet been solved". For many open problems, a solution is not known to exist. Indeed, many open problems turn out to have no solution. An example is if no solution can be derived from the axiomatic system in question, since the answer is "independent" of all the axioms, or other times the solution can be the proof that no solution can exist, e.g. for the halting problem [wikipedia.org]. It was an open problem, you were looking for an algorithm, and bam, some wise guy proves that you can't find it. In that case, certainly, a solution was not "known to exist".

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Sort of true, but in the situation you describe, a proof that no such algorithm exists (e.g. finding integer zeroes of multivariate polynomials -- provably undecidable IIRC, which is a bit surprising) would commonly be considered to "resolve" the open ques

Try this at home

Here's one from mathematics that caught my eye. The goal is to find out whether 78,557 is the lowest Sierpinski* number [wikipedia.org]. All but 8 candidates have been eliminated and there's a project called 17 or bust [wikipedia.org] which is working on the last eight. As their name suggests, the project has personally eliminated 9 numbers already.

* Some of you may recognize Sierpinski from the carpet [wikipedia.org] which bears his name.

I swear this is not my homework

Which problem do you want to see cracked first?

The factors for x^2 + 5x + 6 please, showing work.

Re:I swear this is not my homework

(x+2)(x+3) the work was done in my head. My teacher hated that.

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264203x^2 + 673918x + 388979
If you don't want people to solve them in their heads, make the questions harder...

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Looks like somebody needs to lern2quadraticformula, noob.

http://www.purplemath.com/modules/quadform.htm [purplemath.com]

Distributed computing...

Sounds like an attempt at distributed computing... without the computing part.

Log into web site, check out work unit, complete unit, check in results, rinse and repeat.

There is an assumption in this sort of thing that there is a large enough untapped pool of relevant expertise to make this sort of job distribution effective. Is this actually just a study on whether or not that assumption is correct, or has someone really made that assumption and is expecting success?

I have troubles believing that this is really an effective means for tackling some of the listed problems.

oh, yeah, the Riemann hypothesis

I was going to do that this weekend, but, with one thing and another... Tell you what, remind me Friday.

I've been working on something similar, feedback?

Take a look at open-source software. It's collaborative, usually high-quality, and responsive to people's wants and needs. Apache and Linux, for instance, are two prime examples of how people coming together can do quite a bit in the world, even if in a limited way. Other fields of pursuit have an opportunity to capitalize the lessons learned in the software industry. Applying some of these lessons to the nonprofit sector could result in a greater net impact for society. It is possible to apply ingenuity to hundreds of real-world problems if we have a collaborative organizational structure. We've seen a couple of examples. For instance, look at http://openprosthetics.org/ [openprosthetics.org]. This group has applied the open-source model to design better prosthetics, and a few of their prototypes are better than anything currently available on the market. I've been working on researching this topic for the last three years. Here's my story: In December of '03, I read an article in the New York Times about the World Bank Development Marketplace. A group of farmers in Zimbabwe struggled with a herd of elephants trampling their crops. With a $108,000 grant from the bank, they discovered that planting chili peppers around their crops deterred the elephants and provided a valuable cash crop. I asked a friend, Sandy, what she would do to prevent elephants from eating her crops. Pulling from her childhood experience, she suggested without coaching that the farmers plant marigolds around their crops. After all, marigolds kept the deer out of her vegetable patch! Perhaps marigolds would not deter an elephant. Suppose, then, that Sandy were a member of an online group hosted by Usenet newsgroups, Yahoo! Groups, or Google Groups, seeking a solution to the elephant problem. I am certain that she would have made a similar suggestion, and that the group probably would have recognized both its strengths and weaknesses. There is no guarantee, however, that this group would include the botanist, zoologist, or ecologist necessary to explore this seed of an idea. Let's then consider another recent innovation, the social network. One such network, Friendster, has a good search engine that permits finding people based on their interests. 210 people in my "network" have botany as an interest. 252 people enjoy elephants. 17 like Zimbabwe. Over 1,000 are interested in sustainable development. Might any of them be willing to spend five minutes to answer, "Are there any plants elephants don't like?" Over the last three years, I've developed a site called Cerbumi.org ("to brainstorm" in Esperanto) that combine these two tools. A carefully-designed mailing list system allows for rapid real-time discussion and brainstorming, while a flexible membership database allows project facilitators and other members to find expert advice. Built-in reputation-scoring and availability tools allow members to dictate clearly how willing they are to respond to certain kinds of inquires, and to whom. An executive summary is located at http://about.cerbumi.org/executiveSummary [cerbumi.org], and a Flash-based demonstration is located at http://cerbumi.org/flash/ [cerbumi.org]. What are your thoughts? Do you think this is a useful tool? Would you be willing to spend a few minutes of your time working on various projects?

Good old joke

On the list of unsolved problems, there's N = NP . I'm browsing at +3 here, so I don't know if someone already made the joke and it has been modded down to oblivion because it has been told so many times before, but I'll always remember when the teacher asked in class "Is P = NP" and some guy who probably read the joke online said "Yes, P = NP if N = 1".

union of international associations

could also be worded as "Association of International Associations". Hm. The department of redundancy department anyone?

They forgot one very very important problem needin

... to be solved....

How to make reliable electronic voting machines.

The Gettier problem

The Getties problem came up as an unsolved problem in epistemology, the theory of knowledge. It looks like a problem in unknown knowns to get my former boss backwards. It is listed at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsolved_problems_in_ philosophy [wikipedia.org].

[T]wo men, Smith and Jones, who are awaiting the results of their applications for the same job. Each man has ten coins in his pocket. Smith has excellent reasons to believe that Jones will get the job and, furthermore, knows that Jones has ten coins in his pocket (he recently counted them). From this Smith infers, "the man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket." However, Smith is unaware that he has ten coins in his own pocket. Furthermore, Smith, not Jones, is going to get the job. While Smith has strong evidence to believe that Jones will get the job, he is wrong. Smith has a justified true belief that a man with ten coins in his pocket will get the job; however, according to Gettier, Smith does not know that a man with ten coins in his pocket will get the job, because Smith's belief is "...true in virtue of the number of coins in Smith's pocket, while Smith does not know how many coins are in Smith's pocket, and bases his belief...on a count of the coins in Jones's pocket, whom he falsely believes to be the man who will get the job."

This seems to have something to do with the answer I sometimes give my son when he ask how to spell a word and I answer "With letters."

The problem looks to me to be one of degenerate labeling when passing by reference. Basically, if Smith wants to believe something about people with coins in their pockets he is getting the answer to the question: some people have applied for a job, will one of them get it? If you redirect by the number of coins in a pocket, but you have not checked that this is a unique label, then the question ends up meaning something other than you think it means. The statement about the man with ten coins getting the job is true for the same reason that "A or not A" is true. Regardless of coins, there is no knowledge about the answer to the apparent question (who will be offered the job) until the decision has been made, and since neither Smith nor Jones make that decision, thay can't know its outcome till they are told.

If anyone has worked on this I'd like to hear if this solution has already been discounted.
--
Power your bright ideas with solar: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html [blogspot.com]

Re:What actually has to be done to solve problems?

I would start by dividing both sides by P, leaving the solution: N=1.

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You look for a P (polynomial) solution to a problem being known as NP-Complete (ie, in the NP class). Those problems (aka "hard" problems) have a best known algorithm of non-polynomial complexity (ie, the time to compute the algorithm is non-polynomial in

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i thought that had been done. see NTFS-3G

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"Grue (color)..."? It is pitch black, you are in danger of being eaten by one...

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A lot of people have wondered this (it's a fairly famous philosophical question), and I think the answer is... it's not a valid question to even ask. There's no such thing as "color", it's simply what we choose to name the signals that come from our eyes.

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Yep. So you should stop basing your morality on the principle that absolute freedom is the pinnacle of goodness. Absolute freedom is functionally equivalent to anarchy.