## Monday, August 09, 2010

### On the Deolalikar proof: Crowdsourcing the discussion ?

By now everyone knows about the new proposed proof that P $\ne$ NP by Vinay Deolalikar. Better minds than mine are on the case right now, and little snippets of questions are coming out in comments (especially on Dick Lipton's original post).

It's a little hard to keep track of all the discussions, so I thought I'd try a crowd-sourcing experiment. At this link is a google doc that contains some of the initial discussion topics being raised around the proof. It's crudely organized, with a section for each major set of issues, and paragraphs for each person's comment, with sourcing via URL.

It's editable, so here's the idea. As you see issues get raised and resolved, enter that into the doc. The following rules apply:
• No discussions: this should be comment/resolution only !
• No personal, or nontechnical commentary. This is purely for discussion of the mathematics involved, and nothing else
• Add references (urls, or whatever) whenever possible, and quote all context so as not to cause miscommunication.
The goal is to collect the discussions in one place. Ideally, this would be some kind of polymath setup, and maybe it can be converted over to that (if someone does set it up that way, I'll add a link here).

Let's see if this works !