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Comment by sanxiyn | Hacker News Reader

If this holds, this is the discovery of the century.

Or it will be, if someone manages to create a sufficiently powerful quantum computer. If nobody does it will stay an academic triviality.

If someone builds a useful NP problem solving machine, that will change the world.

No the discovery of the century would be a scalable quantum computer.

That would be the technology of the century, but the science is known. (Unless we need new science to overcome some technical hurdles.)

Don't be silly. A hundred years take you back to 1915. There are plenty of scientific discoveries that is more important than this will ever be that has been discovered since then. The general theory of relativity, the transistor, DNA and many other are obviously more important.

Heck, most of the early groundwork in the computational field is probably more important than an algorithm that is useful only on quantum computers.

Note: This century started in 2000, not one hundred years ago.

"Discovery of the century" is a shorthand for really important. Don't take it literally. Proving P=NP would be extremely significant in mathematics, though.

Nobody doubts that proving P=NP would be the discovery of the century, but that's not what this paper is trying to prove.

You're correct. They're claiming an algorithm to solve an NP hard problem in polynomial time.

I was thinking of "if this paper is a contribution to eventually proving/disproving P=NP...", but failed to express that.

As another commenter pointed out, being able to crack NP problems quickly will give you theorem provers.

At that point quantum computing research will receive gobs of funding -- and our knowledge will absolutely explode.

You can debate whether it's the absolute top discovery, but this would be a lever to shift around the entire math and computer science field. If it wasn't a shaky paper, of course.

You're right. Century is silly. A tractable algorithm for P = NP would be the single greatest discovery of science. Implications would dwarf gravity and DNA.

(Side note: until scott aaronson says otherwise, this paper is wrong. )

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