My Predictions for The New Year



It is the end of the year, and time to make predictions for 2010



Jeron Criswell—The Amazing Criswell—was a psychic, famous for making wildly inaccurate predictions. He was a guest on talk shows of 1960’s, such the Jack Parr show, where he made many of his predictions.

Today I want to make my own predictions for 2010. I doubt that I will be as accurate as The Amazing Criswell, but I will try.



Here is a famous introduction he did for an Ed Wood movie:



One example of his predictions is, according to Wikipedia:

Denver would be struck by a ray from space that would cause all metal to adopt the qualities of rubber, leading to horrific accidents at amusement parks.

Pretty tough to top his predictions, but let’s try.

0⇂0ᄅ ɹoɟ uoıʇɔıpǝɹd ʎɯ

Here are my predictions—they all are for the year 2010.

A problem on Stephen Smale’s list of open problems will be solved. No circuit lower bound of or better will be proved for SAT. A quantum computer will solve a non-trivial problem. A Computer Scientist will win a Nobel Prize. The Goldbach Conjecture will finally be solved—negatively. The number

will be shown not to be the sum of two primes. I will have a paper rejected by a conference. Spam will grow to be 100.001% of all e-mail. The 0.001 is due to sampling error. Someone will discover a polynomial time factoring algorithm—but will not tell anyone. On April over 3 billion people will type “google” into the Google search box, then precisely at 12:00 GMT they will all hit the enter key. This will cause the Internet to crash, and it will be down for 17 hours and 12 minutes. At least one of my predictions will be wrong, but not all of them.

Open Problems

What are your best predictions? I further predict that someone will make a better prediction, than any I have made.

Happy New Year.