POV-Ray : Newsgroups : povray.off-topic : P != NP ? : Re: P != NP ? Server Time
4 Sep 2024 03:18:18 EDT (-0400)
  Re: P != NP ?  
From: Invisible
Date: 10 Aug 2010 07:20:30
Message: <4c6135fe$1@news.povray.org>
Warp wrote:

>   If P != NP, then there can't exist an algorithm which takes any given
> input and solves a provably NP problem on that input in polynomial time.
> 
>   Of course that doesn't mean that *no* inputs can be solved in polynomial
> time (it's rather easy to give trivial individual examples of any NP problem
> which can be solved very fast). It means that you can't write a program
> which cracks all files encrypted with a certain algorithm in polynomial
> time. (And in fact, due to the nature of most NP problems, it won't be
> able to crack almost *any* such problem in polynomial time, except for
> extremely trivial situations.)

Is it not also true that although, for example, factorising numbers is 
an NP problem, factorising the product of two Mersenne primes might turn 
out to have a polynomial-time algorithm?


Post a reply to this message

Copyright 2003-2023 Persistence of Vision Raytracer Pty. Ltd.