A U.S.-based researcher has claimed to solve the sexiest problem in computer science. On the line are a million-dollar prize, a host of scientific breakthroughs and the secure cryptographic systems used for everything from e-mail to banking.
The 100-plus-paged proof was posted on August 6 and has computer scientists and mathematicians around the world buzzing. "It's definitely an approach that we haven't seen before," says Richard Lipton, a computer scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, who dropped everything to take a look at the new paper. "It's complicated and it's not clear that it's going to work. But it's certainly not clear in my mind that it's going to fail."
Vinay Deolalikar, the author of the proof and a researcher at HP Labs--the research arm of computer company Hewlett-Packard--in Palo Alto, Calif., was unavailable for comment. "My email is currently backlogged; please bear with some delays in responding," Deolalikar wrote in an automated response.
To read the full, original article click on this link: Million-dollar problem cracked?: Scientific American
Author: Geoff Brumfiel
