Delete comment from: Computational Complexity
Scott, I am a complexity theorist, you are entitled to your opinions but not everyone working in complexity theory shares them. It has nothing to do with "others" being against complexity theorists announcing nice results or break-troughs. It is about the amount of advertisement that is going on in branding what would not be considered a break-through by mathematical standards.
In recent years there have been people who have done very nice work and have developed interesting mathematics to use computers in solving several problems in combinatorics and graph theory, problems which were open for more than half a century, problems that many combinatorics have worked on and failed to solve. But they don't announce them as break-throughs. It seems that we disagree on what constitutes a break-through result. Maybe you and others who claim these results to be break-through should clarify what you mean by a break-through and then demonstrate that these results satisfy the criteria. As I understand, both results improve the analysis of the previously known methods using computers to lower the constant in the exponent slightly. You may say that people have tried to lower the consent for more than 2 decades, but I am not sure that was the case. I would guess most people would think it might be possible to lower the constant slightly by optimizing CW but thought that it is not significant enough to worse the time to be carried out and might also have lacked the computer skills needed. Is there any other reason you brand these results as break-through?
Another thing that annoys people about these announcements is that there is too much selling going on in theoretical computer science. It is not the way mathematicians are used to work. Although we continue to claim to be mathematicians culturally we have moved from it towards more applied computer science.
To understand the reactions, remember how you felt every time you read about D-Wave and people trying to sell it as more than what it was.
Dec 1, 2011, 3:23:04 AM