Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by MaysonL 2947 days ago
Somehow this seems to be a confusion of categories: markets are real-world mechanisms, while P and NP are mathematical abstractions. Does not compute. To the extent that it does, it's typical mathematical macroeconomic BS.
5 comments

>markets are real-world mechanisms, while P and NP are mathematical abstractions

We use mathematical abstractions to model real-world mechanism every day for millennia.

Not only that, but there are all kinds of mathematically defined limits that no real-world mechanism can bypass, from a purely logical perspective.

If you only have 10 dollars and I give you 20 dollars, you'll have 30 dollars, not 500 -- that's a mathematical truth that absolutely holds in the real world too.

I economics you sometimes define mathematical objects to model real world markets. It's these models that the paper talks about.
Not really.

Computational complexity and markets have more in common that most think. Mechanisms which rely on algorithms, such on auctions, have runtimes.

Hence, why we have a field called algorithmic game theory [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_game_theory

Since when do mathematical limitations not apply to the real world? Have you ever tried to square the circle?
Let's start with the fact that circles do not exist in the real world.
Well, that's a quite insubstantial point, to say the least. Mathematical theorems place upper and lower bounds on what is possible in the real world within almost every domain. Of course, there may often be other reasons why something is impossible, too.
They don't need to exist in mathematics either, but the outcome would be the same. You can't do the real-world analogue of squaring the real-world analogue of a circle.
Markets are a conceptual and mathematica abstaction used to describe the real world.... so is computation.