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?

Re:The ultimate problems?

[Anonymous Coward]

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 loaders).
I discovered that the day a repair guy came home to fix the washer as he found in the barrel of the washer several socks I had thought lost in the twilight zone forever.
But these days people just trash their broken washer and buy a new one, so this secret is kept between repair guys and socks shops. The truth is out there ;)

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

[syousef]

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:The ultimate problems?

[inviolet]

- 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 protection.

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

[loserMcloser]

If you divide both sides by P you are throwing away the possibility that P=0.

The proper thing to do is to manipulate it as

P=NP
P-NP=0
(1-N)P=0

=> P=0 or N=1

Re:colours!

[bjorniac]

This is actually answered by Wittgenstein (amongst others) - it's actually not that complicated. You just associate a word with an input into your mind (the sky is blue). Now, all human eyes work the same way, so if you swapped George and Fred's eyes, they would see the same things. Likewise with visual cortices.

However, inside the mind, you're actually into linguistics - what is perception of "blue" other than seeing something that is blue? Well, "blue" is just a word, I could call blue "bleu" and green "vert" being perverse (or French, if you please). Do the French see different colours to us? Well, that would seem silly, so the logical recourse is that the name of the word is but a name. All we can know of the mind of someone else (barring psychic powers, and other science fictions) is the response that is given by a person - they tell you that they see blue, or a certain (set of) neuron(s) fires.

Similar things have been done with birdsong - do all birds hear song the same way. Well, so far as it is ever going to be possible to know (above assumptions about psychic powers made), yes. They have the same reaction.

Now, I know that this may not be satisfactory, but for those who know a little mathematics, you could call them identical up to isomorphism - if you give two things a complete set of inputs and they output the exact same thing as one another for each, you call them isomorphic (or identical). In that case human brains are identical.

See: http://acp.eugraph.com/news/news03/margoliash.html [eugraph.com] and various others for the bird references.

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

[A.K.A_Magnet]

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 function of the entry, making it impossible to compute for high values of the entry). It has been proven that if you find an algorithm of polynomial complexity for a problem of the NP class, then P=NP (because you could then transform any non-polynomial algorithm into an equivalent polynomial algorithm the same way you did in the first place). All it takes is to find *ONE* algorithm of polynomial complexity/time for an NP problem. The problem is, nobody has been able to find any, and people have been searching for quite some time now :) (that's why everybody thinks P!=NP). Good luck proving P=NP then ;)