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Want to Take On An Open/Unsolved Problem?
Posted by
Zonk
on Sun Feb 04, 2007 09:27 PM
from the make-like-einstein dept.
from the make-like-einstein dept.
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?
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One of the problems taken from wikipedia in econ. (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, good luck using the internet discussions to solve THAT problem.....
I read it on the internet (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Parent
Re:I read it on the internet (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:One of the problems taken from wikipedia in eco (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Re:One of the problems taken from wikipedia in eco (Score:4, Interesting)
*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.
Parent
Easy (Score:5, Funny)
No larger than necessary
In places where unrestricted market forces are detrimental
No
Yes
In a way that maximizes overall social wellbeing
To the extent that it ceases to be harmful to the overall health of society
Parent
Not "easy" but "facile". (Score:4, Insightful)
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:
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!
Parent
Yes, I have a solution! (Score:3, Funny)
The ultimate problems? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:The ultimate problems? (Score:4, Funny)
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.
Parent
really? (Score:5, Funny)
That's your opinion. Midget porn afficionados would beg to differ.
First date! (Score:3, Funny)
How to get a date?
How about somebody taking on the problem of ... (Score:5, Interesting)
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 ... (Score:5, Funny)
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!
Parent
Re:How about somebody taking on the problem of ... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Re:How about somebody taking on the problem of ... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Parent
Re:How about somebody taking on the problem of ... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Parent
object to definition of "Open Problem" (Score:4, Interesting)
Try this at home (Score:5, Interesting)
* Some of you may recognize Sierpinski from the carpet [wikipedia.org] which bears his name.
I swear this is not my homework (Score:5, Funny)
The factors for x^2 + 5x + 6 please, showing work.
Re:I swear this is not my homework (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Distributed computing... (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Funny)
They forgot one very very important problem needin (Score:5, Funny)
How to make reliable electronic voting machines.
Re:What actually has to be done to solve problems? (Score:4, Funny)
Parent