Thursday, May 05, 2011

[THEORY] Is nature a giant guessing algorithm ?

I was reading Dr. Lipton's blog on guessing and was really impressed on how he relates the power of guessing with the question whether P=NP or P!=NP.

Looks like nature on the other had seems to be solving several combinatorial problems almost instantly (e.g. folding of the proteins to minimize its energy), does nature guess the solution to the problem ?. One way to guess a solution to a problem is to look inside the building blocks which formulated the problem. Dr. Lipton gives an example were we were supposed to guess the digits which can open a lock -- the lock we normally use in the GYM. It may be hard to guess the digits which can open a lock without any help. However if we can get an X-ray of the levers we can guess the solution to the problem more easily. So does this mean nature looks at the problems in a totally different perspective ? , is there something very intuitive to the nature which the humans fail to recognize ?.

Why did all the great mathematicians failed to find a polynomial solution 3-SAT ? -- or prove it does not exist. Is there something missing in the way we are looking at a digital circuit ? , can we design guessing algorithms to solve the NP-Complete problems ?. We don't know the answers for all these. But I'm sure that nature is a great guessing algorithm and it may be impossible for us to guess its guessing algorithm.

No comments: