If P=NP, then the world would be a profoundly different place than we usually assume it to be. There would be no special value in “creative leaps,” no fundamental gap between solving a problem and recognizing the solution once it’s found. Everyone who could appreciate a symphony would be Mozart; everyone who could follow a step-by-step argument would be Gauss; everyone who could recognize a good investment strategy would be Warren Buffett. It’s possible to put the point in Darwinian terms: if this is the sort of universe we inhabited, why wouldn’t we already have evolved to take advantage of it? – Scott Aaronson (reason #9)
When you have some free time, watch this amazing lecture by Avi Wigderson about one of the great open problems in all of mathematics.
[...] has come up once before on this blog. I’ll paste the previous entry below: Does P=NP? If P=NP, then the world would [...]