Reasons to care: In honor of Scott Aaronson

Update (5/7): This post earned me a spot on the not-so-exclusive club of people called names such as a “narrow-minded” “biased” “religious worshiper” “who doesn’t want to learn something difficult and new” by Luboš Motl. Interestingly, he mostly takes issue with my discounting the possibility that the complexity of SAT is something like or . Although I do believe such an algorithm is extremely unlikely, its discovery wouldn’t be a bad thing to computational complexity. On the contrary, I imagine that if such an algorithm is discovered then investigating whether it can be improved and implemented would be seen as meriting the investment of a huge amount of resources, possibly larger than those given for the Large Hadron Collider.

[ First, an announcement. Mark Braverman and Bernard Chazzelle are organizing a workshop on May 20-21 on Natural Algorithms and the Sciences , bringing together researchers from computer science, mathematics, physics, biology, and engineering to explore interactions among algorithms, dynamical systems, statistical physics, and complexity theory (in all senses of the term) ]

In some very pleasant though unsurprising news, Scott Aaronson got tenure at MIT. Among his many talents and activities, Scott has done a fantastic amount of outreach and exposition, explaining the concepts of theoretical computer science and quantum computing to other scientists and interested laymen. He also spends considerable energy trying to dispel wrong opinions with amazing patience and resilience (apparently due to his immutable psychological makeup). So, in honor of Scott getting tenure, just after a bruising flamewar with various “interesting characters” he managed to find in some dark corner of the Internet, I thought I’d step up to help him along and try to do my share of dispelling some common myths about complexity and particularly the vs problem.

P vs. NP: Reasons to Care

The question (and its close variants) is the central question of computer science. In fact, its hard to think of another question in any field that combines such mathematical depth and beauty with great importance to understanding nature. Scott did a pretty good job explaining why is true. In this brief post I’ll try to outline why I and many others are so intrigued by this question, by trying to answer various objections that are commonly made against its importance. Some of these issues are mentioned in my book with Arora but I thought a more explicit discussion might be worthwhile.

What if = but the algorithm for SAT takes or time?

In other words, what if SAT has exponential complexity for all inputs up to size for some huge number , and only starts becoming comparatively easier after that number. This is the equivalent of asking what if the laws of nature we’ve learned so far are true only in the corner of the universe we’ve managed to observe, and are completely different in other areas. Yes, this is a logical possibility, but we have not seen the remotest reason to believe it. Also, in recent years we’ve been exploring the computational universe (in terms of the huge growth of input sizes and computational resources) at a much faster rate than the physical one, and as we do so, it only becomes more important to understand the asymptotic behavior of algorithms. Having said that, I agree that after proving , the next order of business would be to get a more precise estimate of the number of computational operations needed to solve length- instances of SAT as a function of .

The question is irrelevant since is only a mathematical model having nothing to do with efficient computation.

The universality of computation, leading to equivalent models whether you study Turing machines, cellular automatons, electronic computers, mathematical deduction systems, or computation by natural systems (see workshop above) or economic markets, has been a surprising and central phenomena, validating the formal study of Turing machines or Boolean circuits. But I do agree is an imperfect model for efficient computation. Yet it is still a fine tool for the question of studying the complexity of SAT or other NP-complete problems. It’s true that is often too permissive a model, allowing algorithms that are prohibitively expensive to run on today’s technology, but this is not as much of an issue when the question is whether you can beat the exponential-time brute force algorithm. (Indeed, it has been often observed that natural problems either have fairly efficient algorithms with or running time, or seem to have exponential (i.e., ) complexity.)

Perhaps a more serious concern is that may be too restrictive, since it does not allow taking advantage of quantum mechanics (or maybe other physical theories), and is also only concerned with worst case computation. While those concerns are valid in principle, it seems that while quantum computers can do wonders for certain structured problems such integer factoring, their effect on NP-hard problems such as SAT is fairly limited. Also, while it is possible to posit a theoretical world in which but every problem is easy to solve on the average, the evidence so far strongly points to that not being the case. So, while one can argue that instead of we should be asking what’s the size of the smallest quantum circuit that solves SAT on the average case, all evidence points out to these two questions having the same answer. Moreover, at the moment we’re so far from resolving either question that the tools we have to study all those variants are the same. When we start getting close to , we might want to try to understand the more refined variants such as quantum or average-case complexity.

is not a fundamental property of nature such as the physical laws.

“Fundamental” is a subjective term, and can be used in different senses. The fundamental theorem of algebra can be (and is) derived from more basic axioms, and so this theorem is fundamental not because it’s the foundation for all algebraic facts but because it is central and important. One can make a similar analogy between “high level” laws of nature, positing the impossibility of perpetual motion machines or devices that transmit information faster than light, and the laws governing behavior of elementary particles that may be used to derive them. , positing (essentially) the impossibility of a machine that gets a SAT formula and spits out a satisfying assignment, is comparable to these high level laws in flavor, and I would say also in importance.

is only about practical efficiency whereas the deeper / more fundamental question is which computational problems can be solved at all.

I don’t think anyone that actually studied complexity for even a short while would share this objection. To paraphrase Edmonds (whom we quote in our book), in many contexts the difference between polynomial and exponential is more significant than the difference between exponential and infinite. An example we give in the book is Arthur Ganson’s kinetic sculpture Machine with Concrete. It’s composed of a sequence of 12 gears, each rotating 50 times slower than the previous one. While the first gear rotates 200 times per minute, the last one, at that speed, is to all practical purposes stationary, and indeed is embedded in a block of concrete. So, exponentially hard problems are essentially unsolvable. But it turns out that in most cases the problems we want to solve (from simulating the physical world to finding if there is an input making our program take more than units of time) are trivially computable, so in such cases the interesting question is whether their complexity is polynomial or exponential.

A related concern is that only involves “elementary” mathematics, as opposed to “deep” questions such as, say, the Riemann hypothesis. While the terms “deep” and “elementary” are not well defined (it seems that, similar to the AI effect, some people consider every problem or result in fields they don’t like as “shallow”), I believe it is again the case that this is not a concern shared by people that actually studied computational complexity. While this field is very young, it already contains several deep and beautiful results, and it is clear that many more will be needed for us to approach resolving .

Resolving is not interesting, since we already know the answer is that .

I can sympathize with this objection, as I too firmly believe that and in fact I believe that concrete problems such as, say, CIRCUIT-SAT cannot be solved in subexponential time. The reason we are looking for the proof is not just to get an extra level of confirmation to what we already know, but because we believe coming up with such a proof will necessarily have to yield new deep insights about the nature of computation. It is impossible to predict what would be the nature of such insights or what would be the extent of their applications; but in particular a better understanding of the dividing line between easy and hard problems can yield on the one hand new algorithms, and on the other hand new encryption schemes that are provably impossible to break.

Even if = , we wouldn’t necessarily be able to automate creativity, find hard proofs, beautify symphonies etc..

Some people making this objection are really thinking of the first objection, namely that but the algorithm is so inefficient that it still holds that in the “observable computational universe”. Others note that it’s not immediately clear how you use an algorithm for SAT to do things such as perfect artificial intelligence, weather prediction, etc… Lance Fortnow has a nice description in his book of a universe in which (see also Impagliazzo’s survey). Indeed, given the vast amount of NP-complete problems from all science, combined with the ability (if ) to solve even problems higher in the polynomial hierarchy, I think it’s hard to overestimate the implications of an efficient SAT algorithm. But I still do not see achieving this ideal world as the main reason to study . As I said, even if we don’t have a formal proof, there are plenty of reasons to believe that . So, I view the fact we can not rule out this hypothetical computational utopia not as a sign that it might be true but rather as demonstrating how much is still left for us to discover in the world of computation.