P vs NP craziness

From: Anonymous (noone_at_nowhere.net)
Date: 10/28/04

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    Date: Thu, 28 Oct 2004 09:20:39 -0400

    A couple of recent threads have got me wondering if P vs NP mania has
    moved from the ranks of usenet cranks into academia. First there was
    the paper by Bringsjord and Taylor claiming that P=NP (about which too
    much has already been said):

    http://kryten.mm.rpi.edu/scb.pnp.solved14.pdf

    More recently, there was the paper by Moustapha Diaby using an LP
    formulation of the traveling salesman problem to allegedly prove that P=NP:

    http://www.business.uconn.edu/users/mdiaby/tsplp/

    Both of these attempts were made by people in academia who presumably
    stand to lose some stature by making half-baked claims about P vs. NP.
    Selmer Bringsjord is chair of the Cognitive Science department at RPI,
    and his paper certainly isn't going to be attracting top students to the
    program there. Diaby is an associate professor at UConn and probably
    has the most at stake, if he hasn't earned tenure yet.

    I think it's telling that neither of these people are computer
    scientists. Bringsjord's background is in philosophy (which explains a
    lot, I suppose) and Diaby's is in operations research in the business
    school (and having written papers on IP and LP, he should probably know
    better). If either of these people had tried bouncing their ideas off
    of a complexity theorist colleague, they might have gotten some
    constructive feedback and saved themselves the embarrasment. But
    perhaps the temptation of a $1 million bounty makes people do strange
    things.

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