Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal by Zach Weinersmith for December 05, 2016

Transcript:

It has been shown that all NP-hard problems are the same. If you've solved one, you've solved them all. I propose a corollary: if you have a stupid solution to one NP-hard problem, it stupidly solves them all. I call this a sullooshun. For instance, the traveling salesman problem. A salesman has to visit a lot of cities, once each, then go home. What's the shortest route? Well, if you collapse the universe into a singularity, there's only ever one route. So, the sulloosgun to every traveling salesman problem is collapse the universe. Solved! Now let's apply this sullooshun to the bin-packing problem, which concerns how to efficiently pack boxes of various sizes into bins. If you collapse the universe, everything is the same size, and anyway. Why bother packing if you can't go anywhere? Salt! Consider the halting problem. Is there a general way to tell if a program with a given input will ever stop? The sullooshun is yes. In the singularity, time doesn't exist. The program can't even start, much less stop. Solved! Do you know anything about mathematics? That is beyond the scope of this talk.