NYT: OpenAI results upend a key tenet of computer science — P vs NP
_akpiper · x · 2026-11-08
- A New York Times feature by Cade Metz reports that a longstanding hypothesis — that problems whose solutions are easy to check (NP) must always be hard to solve — has been challenged by OpenAI's recent math results, raising the possibility of radical new computational efficiencies.
- The piece uses Sudoku as an analogy for P vs NP, one of the Clay Mathematics Institute's million-dollar Millennium Prize problems: P = quickly solvable, NP = quickly verifiable; common sense says solving is far harder than checking.
- UCSD professor Russell Impagliazzo and other theorists help explain the stakes. The report also inspired a side project: building an "Open Humanities Questions" list modeled on the Millennium Prize Problems to spark AI excitement among humanities scholars.
Related event: NYT: OpenAI Advances Shake Core Computer Science Assumption(2 posts)→
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