Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by sebzim4500 1033 days ago
Are you quoting someone? I did ctrl-f and found nothing.
1 comments

It's literally the first comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37182868

I do agree the reply about brute forcing the solution space is a bit trollish, in the sense that while it does purport to provide a "constructive" way to find the polynomial time NP solver, it's not actually feasible.

The sleight of hand is where it asserts that the length of the program is a "constant" -- which is technically true because it doesn't depend on the length of the NP problem they're trying to solve... but we're not trying to solve the NP problem, we're trying to find the solver for the NP problem.

I'm no expert in all things NP, but the assumption that a polynomial time SAT solver (if it exists) would have a "normal" length seem to be a very suspect assumption.