This is what I think. Lee Smolin left the US for Canada too.

A continuous effort is required of any system to solicit and incorporate negative feedback in a healthy manner. This should be used to keep improving the system actively or even to maintain the status quo, else systems end up quickly up with rot or ruin.
If a part is randomly ejected out of your car while running, could mean you forgot to lubricate or tighten the bolts, or the design is poor and needs to be improved.

Things seem to boil over in a flash once they go over a “tipping point”. (Malcolm Gladwell etc) They are ignored or undetected till then.

#128
Also I think Gerhard Woeginger is doing a great job. He is not really explicitly passing negative judgment on the proofs. Sometimes to have the “good”, we need to know what is “bad” too! What approaches to avoid etc.

There is a chance that one of them is even correct someday! Some people may choose not to submit to a journal. It has already happened in 2002-2003. We never can tell. After all, a journal takes months and years and the paper disappears until judgment is passed as with V.D.’s manuscript!
There are different topics on the arXiv, G.W. is collecting only the PNP stuff in a convenient place.

I think we should not judge his intentions as it is his bandwidth, his hobby. He is not physically storing copies of the papers on his webserver – just links and descriptions.

“I resent the idea that we’re in some kind of faith contest, and you’re the hands-down winner. So far as I know you’ve never tested your faith? I’m willing to do it for mine. Here, take a look out that window. There’s a big Foucault pendulum out there. The bob must weigh five hundred pounds. My faith says that the amplitude of a free pendulum–how far it’ll swing away from the vertical position–can never increase. It can only decrease. I’m willing to go out there, put the bob I front of my nose, let go, have it swing away and then back toward me. If my beliefs are in error, I’ll get a five-hundred-pound pendulum smack in the face. Come on. You want to test my faith?”

Now the real question is, how long would the pendulum need to be for the Coriolis effect alone to shift it out of my way by the time it came back? My guess is “way too big”, but *that* would be a *much* cooler demonstration of “faith” in sciency stuff.

An anonymous poster on Dick Lipton’s blog tipped me to a wonderful (draft) textbook by Oded Goldreich that anticipates the key aspects of the Ingeniarius universe.

In particular, Oded’s discussion of “proof-oblivious verification procedures,” together his (immediately following) discussion in Section 2.3.3: Is it the case that NP-proofs are useless?, was just what I had been looking for.

I mean, this is an extremely hard problem, and even brilliant researchers are bound to make mistakes — so their papers will just remain at the Arxiv.org website, and may never get published in a journal.

It is VERY wrong to ridicule such serious efforts. I don’t know if Woeginger is trying to NAME AND SHAME these people and make fun of them. As anyone knows, important concepts and ideas can be learnt, even from failed attempts. Failure is the first step in the path to success.

I suggest that he go through your list, just keep the serious attempts, and remove the non-serious attempts. Please say very clearly at the top of the webpage that the attempts described on that page are serious. There is NO need to mention the non-serious attempts and ridicule them.

I admire Cook’s achievements very much. However…

Stephen Cook can be GOD himself, but who the bloody hell cares? During the tenure review process, *IF* the decision was made in good faith, after a careful and thorough review, then Berkeley MUST fully stand by its decision to deny him tenure — NO need for Berkeley to feel ashamed or regretful about it.

Of course, many people will say “It was Berkeley’s loss”, however, I must disagree with them. People shine differently at different points in their lives. Some shine brilliantly throughout their lives — some shine brilliantly at some times and lack lustre at other times. As someone mentioned in Llipton’s blog, even brilliant people just have one or two peak “pinnacles” in their career — they DO NOT do brilliant stuff each and every hour.

Imagine (ha ha ha) that I come up with an awesome new proof technique (involving transfinite induction over the Bellantoni-Cook formulas for languages in P, say) that lets me show that a certain problem X (where X is obviously in PSPACE) is outside of P. So that shows P!=PSPACE, already a breakthrough result. But X is an artificial concoction painfully constructed to make the induction step work, and despite that, that step is still a combinatorial mess involving a monstrous computer calculation like the 4-color theorem. And yet despite -that-, X doesn’t really seem to be so special, so it looks plausible that with even more grunt work and huge calculations, but not any particularly brilliant new ideas, I can find a problem Y that lets the same proof go through, except Y is also provably in NP instead of just PSPACE, so P!=NP. And if I publish the P=PSPACE proof, someone else does the obvious but tedious step of finding Y and collecting the Millenium prize.

So do I publish the P!=PSPACE proof? Or do I sit on it quietly for N years while trying to find Y myself? I think these giant prizes and hype around specific open problems are messing up the spirit of scientific collaboration. This is why Perelman turned down the MP, for example–he thought Hamilton should get half of it. I wonder if the Clay foundation thought of taking him up on that.

Meta-question: where are the proof theorists in the P vs NP business? I mean the type of folks who like to read J-Y Girard at bedtime (I’ve tried this but it’s too hard for me). I’d expect someone has tried doing complexity separations like what I described above and it didn’t work, but they’re so quiet about it. I see various papers that look sort of relevant, but none of them even mention P vs NP. Are they even thinking about it? I’d think yes, but they’re maintaining discretion.

Interesting, I agree.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Cook#Biography

But he had to sacrifice his own reputation for it.

Hmmm … that’s not so clear.

“A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems” (Paul Erdos) … and of course, nowadays we have Adderall (a potent prescription amphetamine derivative).

A Modest Proposal: Mathematical articles should receive an asterisk if one or more theorems were proved with prescription pharmaceutical assistance.

An unthinkable policy? As cognition-enhancing drugs become more powerful and more widely available—and as with steroids in athletics, their efficacy becomes more indeniable—perhaps eventually the opposite policy will become simply infeasible.

`Cuz heck, the number of mathematicians is expanding hugely … while the number of Fields Medals and Clay Millennium Prizes remains constant.

Obviously there are some tough moral issues here … and for pure libertarians, there are some mighty interesting academic game-theoretic issues too.

TCS Woodstock is minus the mind-enhancing substances, unless …