From the How-To-Become-A-Millionaire-In-1200-Simple-Steps Dept.

[J.J. Maxx]

So the almighty Math Council has put a bounty on the answers to 7 of the most notorious unsolved math problems of the millenium.

You get a million bucks every time you solve one so get cracking! It's better odds than the lottery. :thumbsup:

So get your calculators running! (http://www.claymath.org/Millennium_Prize_Problems/)

Or something...

/me runs away counting up by twos...

[Ganonator]

umm... ok.. how come none of the problems are practical. Seriously. How about they also explain them in english. This zeta crap blows my fucking mind. How about they make it HARDER that it really is as well?? fuck it dude.

[Beldaran]

I have encountered these problems before. I believe that without a strong background in higher level abstract mathematics, these problems are quite unapproachable, and their presence on the web is just for grins. I know that even my god of a math professor just laughs when I ask if he's ever tried to solve one.

[slothman]

I read about this like years ago in slashdot. In any case though I know a bit about math I don't know enough to do those.

[AtmaWeapon]

Originally posted by Ganonator
umm... ok.. how come none of the problems are practical. Seriously. How about they also explain them in english. This zeta crap blows my PRECIOUS mind. How about they make it HARDER that it really is as well?? fuck it dude.


Perhaps why these are unsolved problems. I mean, think about it for a second. A national board of mathematicians have put a $1M bounty on these problems because they have been unsolved for hundreds of years in some cases. Did you think they'd put the reward on problems they could easily solve themselves?

The person who solves any of these will most likely not care as much about the money as the scientific publicity. For these people, math is life, and solving an "unsolvable" problem is a divine act.

[J.J. Maxx]

Yeah, like you wouldn't see a $1,000,000 prize on

15x + 1y + .25z = 100

LOL

[fatcatfan]

Call me crazy, but I think I could make some progress on that P vs NP problem. I think I could write a program to solve the sort of problem they mention in a decent amount of time.

[Ultra22Lemming]

I think I heard about something like this a while ago.

[AlexMax]

THEN GET TO IT MR FATCATFAN!!!!11111

O_o...seriously, that shit is far beyond my grasp....

EDIT: You might want to try this out...

http://www.octave.org/

GNU Octave might be useful for shit like this.

[fatcatfan]

The thing is, they want something more than just a program to prove that one problem is solvable. They want to prove or disprove the whole P vs NP theory, and one program won't do it.

[Paradox]

pretty funny that they can do stuff with P vs NP with minesweeper...

[Foxx]

Holy mackerel, someone's published a serious mathematics paper on Minesweeper. Gee whillickers! It's great because I was nuts about Minesweeper when I was about 13.