No P = NP Proof After All 318
00_NOP writes "Internet commerce seems safe for now as Russian computer scientist Vladimir Romanov has conceded that his previously published solution to the '3 SAT' problem of boolean algebra does not work. If his solution did work it would have shown that many problems thought to be unsolvable with conventional computers — including decrypting your HTTPS encoded credit card number — would have been solvable in polynominal time. Romanov, who is very far from the sort of crank who normally claims to have proved P = NP or the opposite, is not giving up though..."
Re:Let me ask a "stupid" question (Score:3, Interesting)
Seriously, what is with people thinking "if I can not understand it fuck it" these days? How arrogant have we become?
1 word: Reagan. He's the one who started all this nonsense about how it's a bad thing to be educated and intelligent. It made his hick supporters "feel bad" so now they lash out at the "intelligencia".
Not bad for a troll.
Anti-intellectualism in American Life, by Richard Hofstadter published in ... 1963. Not 1988. In fact Hofstadter was dead by '70.
"‘the more learned and witty you bee, the more fit to act for Satan will you bee" John Cotton 1642 in Boston USA
Its across the political spectrum, not just a republican thing.
Re:This will NO break any encryption algorithms... (Score:2, Interesting)
This is just wrong. Both prime factorization and discrete log, have polynomial size certificates and are therefore in NP. While none of the problems are know to be NP complete (and as you say, we suspect they are not). Proving that P=NP will still show that there exists polynomial time solutions to both problems.