this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2026
130 points (95.1% liked)

Technology

89005 readers
2656 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
L3s@lemmy.world
enu@lemmy.world
technopagan@lemmy.world
L4s@lemmy.world
L3s@hackingne.ws
130
There's a new way to break RSA that's faster than anything we've seen before (arstechnica.com)
submitted 4 weeks ago by return2ozma@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world
54 comments fedilink hide all child comments
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] a_non_monotonic_function@lemmy.world 1 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

No, we don't use it as an adjective. It is a set. That's literally all it is.

And predicating anything on the assumption that P equals NP is rather absurd. Of course, we can't rule it out as a possibility. But virtually nobody in the discipline believes that to be the case. And honestly, why would it be? If there were polynomial time solutions to that many problems of that degree of importance, surely we would have discovered something by now.

[–] MangoCats@feddit.it 1 points 3 weeks ago

virtually nobody in the discipline believes that to be the case.

While I agree that NP is likely not within P, that "No True Scotsman" argument is exceptionally weak for such a well disciplined field.

[–] solrize@lemmy.ml 0 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

No, we don’t use it as an adjective.

From the first sentence of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NP-hardness : "In computational complexity theory, a computational problem H is called NP-hard if...".

Of course, we can’t rule it out as a possibility.

Exactly, we don't know for certain. Of course it's very unlikely, but in math when we say we know something for certain, it means there's a theorem to that effect. There reason to think that factoring is not NP-hard but we don't know for certain. If you still claim otherwise, can you cite a theorem?

Anyway, yes, you're confused, and at this point you're spouting misinformation. You might consider reading a book or taking a class.

If there were polynomial time solutions to that many problems of that degree of importance, surely we would have discovered something by now.

It's still an open problem, there's a $1 million Clay prize waiting for you to claim it if you have a proof either way.