My objection to the P!=NP proof

There's a lot of genuine interest in the attempt to proove P!=NP. I was interested enough to read the abstract and then I got worried. I kept reading and was quite puzzled by the general approach of the paper. My understanding was sufficient to develop a simple objection to the proof. Luckily, I could find a statement in the proof that admits a simple counter-example.

1. My general concern is the use of Markov properties to prove some deterministic properties. It may be possible, but quite hard. In general, independence is a very strong property and it is hard to say anything about the lack of independence. Therefore, the reliance on the large size of connected variables isn’t sufficient.

2. Following (1), the following statement is plain wrong and easy to verify:
Chapter 2, pg 28. “When the size of the smallest irreducible interactions is O(n), then we need O(c^n) parameters where c > 1 .”

Before giving an example, I rephrase it for completness:

When the size of the smallest irreducible interactions [in a markov network with N variables], is n, then we need O(c^n) parameters [to specify the distribution] where c > 1.

Here’s a counter example. Consider a markov network, of N binary variables. Each variable can be 0 or 1 with probability 1/2. All variables are independent so far. Now, add a constrain that all variables can not be 1 at the same time.

This simple constrain requires ALL variables to be connected, but the description is compact.
In this simple case, the apparent complexity is high, but the distribution is quite simple.

Is "we-flew-to-the-moon" a good justification for "don't-cut-our-budget"?

I am puzzled by NASA's open funding proposal. In short it says, please ask this president to not cut our funding. This is all great and the space program definitely is an important pursuit for humanity.

That said, the proposal doesn't really answer the question - should I support it? The arguments in favor:
"It is critical to our country's success to remain the leader in human spaceflight"; "No other nation has ever placed a person on the moon." are kind of one-sided and don't give ground for any understanding of the decision.

Are we weighing one man on the moon (40 years ago) v.s. universal healthcare for 300 million people? Does leadership in the space exploration means there we need no peers?Is it worth an eventual garage-sale of the whole country (through excessive debt)?

I'm still puzzled.

Price on carbon, cap-and-trade. Remind me, why do we want that?

There has been plenty of talk recently about reducing emissions. The main suggestion is to put a price on carbon or introduce some cap-and-trade system to force the well-off countries to stop using fossil fuel. A side-effect of that is that we'll push the development of arguably better source like solar and wind.

There is plenty of doubt that reducing carbon emissions will actually affect anything. There are plenty of dissenters who question the science, question the motivation and question the solutions. There are newspaper articles, research studies and books written to rebuke the man-made global warming theory and political agenda.

I totally agree with the goal of developing more solar, wind, nuclear energy, investing in more efficient ways to do things and great new ways to avoid commute. I think these are the technologies of the future and we should push for them as hard as we can.

Now what about CO2 and emissions? What if US, EU and Japan all went renewable in 10 years. Would that cut the emissions to 0??? No. There's another 5 billion people who can't afford fancy gadgets and expensive energy sources. They wouldn't mind cheap oil though. If demand for oil and gas drops in developed countries, will the OPEC substantially cut the production to keep the prices high? There're still non-OPEC countries that sell stuff. Will the developing countries sacrifice their right for better life in favor of reduced carbon emissions? I doubt.

If anything, I believe we should get much much more involved into the well-being of the poorest on our planet. How do we build an economic system to integrate 6.5 billion people? How do we make it fair? How do we make sure that kids whose siblings die in infancy feel safe having only 2 children? How do we ensure that every person on Earth has a path to modern economic system, modern education, proper mentoring and guidance?

These are much-much more urgent questions compared to the man-made global warming "what-ifs".

For this CVPR I did two passes of review. On the first one, I made at-a-glance decision. On the second pass, I (hopefully) did justice to the paper. The interesting bit is the transition matrix in decisions. The rows are the "at-a-glance" decision, the columns are the final one.

. Reject Weak reject Borderline Weak accept Accept . Reject 3 . Weak reject 1 . Borderline 1 . Weak accept 1 2 1 . Accept .

LaTeX to Matlab

I want to have LaTeX to Matlab converter. You just write your paper in LaTeX and bingo! Matlab/C++/Java implementation is there. Here's your map-reduce version to run on those space 500 CPUs. Here's another one for your fancy NVidia GPU.

Why haven't someone written it?

Super fast "du"

Have you ever tried to get a sense where is your disk space? I have.

First I'd run something like "df -h" and it'll tell me:
Useg: 490G, Available: 20M.

Then I'd run "du -ch --max-depth=1 | disk_use " to get a sense where are the bad guys. Then you do "cat disk_use | grep G" and proceed recursively.

This thing works, but it's really painful, because at the top level "du -ch" has to traverse the directory structure and compute the *exact total*. That takes too much time. I don't care about exact numbers. All I want is the estimate of where are the biggest data chunks are. *This estimate is really easy to get.*

We shall randomly select individual data pages(I mean inodes), find their respective top level directories and add +1 to each top level directory. If we do that for ~10K pages, we'll get a very good estimate as to which top level directories contain most data. If you want to get nubmers in KB, simply normalize them (make them sum to 1) and multiply by the total used space.

If you have some free time, please do it.

This insane world

Ok. Let's all buy organic and save the world. Doesn't work.

I got some tea from http://www.ineeka.com/.

It's all nice pictures, "cultivating consciousness", ..., nice stuff. The problem is that the tea comes in a metal box. Think about it.

One metal box for 20 tea bags?! How is that sustainable?

(the tea is good, though)