When I was a graduate student, I studied magnetism in massive stars. Lower mass stars (like our sun) demonstrate convection in their outermost layers, which creates turbulent magnetic fields. About 1 in 10 higher mass stars (more than ~8x the mass of the sun) host magnetic fields that are strong and very stable. These stars do not have convection in their outer layers (and thus can’t generate magnetic fields in the same fashion as the sun), and it is thought that these fields are formed very early in the star’s life. Despite much effort, we haven’t really figured out how that happens.
I love how you stopped to explain stuff like what a big star is, but not the funny magnetism itself
Origin of life matters to a lot of people I think. RNA vs other self-replicating molecules? Moon-based tidal PCR? Cell formation etc.
If the solution to a problem is easy to check for correctness, must the problem be easy to solve?
For instance, it is easy to check if a filled sudoku grid is a valid solution. Must it therefore be easy to solve sudokus?
Most people would probably intuitively answer “no”, and most computer scientists agree, but this has still not been proven, so we actually don’t know.
Well, there’s counterfactual examples of this, so it must not be true.
In pretty much every single relationship worldwide, one person can very easily determine if the recommendation from the other for where to eat or what to watch is correct or not.
And yet successfully figuring out where to eat or what to watch is nigh impossible.
I think there’s a
fighterfurther* problem, it may be true and we just don’t know the easy way to do it.
I think my favorite troll statement to a mathematician/comp scientist is:
“Actually, P > NP - there exist problems where it’s harder to verify a solution than to arrive at one”
Isn’t it proof enough? Using the Sudoku example: there are certainly different levels of difficulties, depending on how many numbers are set in the beginning and other parameters. Checking if the solved answer is correct, is always the same “difficulty” - thus there is no correlation between the difficulty of the puzzle at the beginning and checking the Correctness. Some people might not be able to solve it, but they certainly can check if the solution is right
Isn’t it proof enough?
Unfortunately no. The question is a simplification of the P versus NP problem.
The problem lies in having to prove that no method exists that is easy. How do you prove that no matter what method you use to solve the sudoku, it can never be done easily? You’ll need to somehow prove that no such method exists, but that is rather hard. In principle, it could be that there is some undiscovered easy way to solve sudokus that we don’t know about yet.
I’m using sudokus as an example here, but it could be a generic problem. There’s also a certain formalism about what “easy” means but I won’t get into it further, it is a rather complicated area.
Interestingly, it involves formal languages a lot, which is funny as you wouldn’t think computer science and linguistics have a lot in common, but they do in a lot of ways actually.
You can solve any sudoku easily by trying every possible combination and seeing if they are correct. It’ll take a long time, but it’s fairly easy.
Well it just so happens that the definition of “easy” in the actual problem is essentially “fast”. So under that definition, checking every single possible solution is not an “easy” method.
What if the sudoku is 1 milllion lines by 1 million lines? How about a trillion by a trillion? The answer is still easy to check, but it takes exponentially larger to solve the board as the board gets larger. That’s the jist of the problem: Is there a universal solution to a problem like this that can solve any size sudoku before the heat death of the universe?
For the purposes of OPs problem (P v NP), it considers not particular solutions, but general algorithmic approaches. Thus, we consider things as either Hard (exponential time, by size of input), or Easy (only polynomial time, by size of input).
A number of important problems fall into this general class of Hard problems: Sudoku, Traveling Salesman, Bin Packing, etc. These all have initial setups where solving them takes exponential time.
On the other hand, as an example of an easy problem, consider sorting a list of numbers. It’s really easy to determine if a lost is sorted, and it’s always relatively fast/easy to sort the list, no matter what setup it had initially.
Most people would probably intuitively answer “no”, and most computer scientists agree, but this has still not been proven, so we actually don’t know.
I disagree, I think most computer scientists believe that P != NP, at least when it comes to classical computers. If we believed that P = NP, then why would we bother with encryption?
I think you’ve misunderstood 😅. Answering “no” to that question corresponds to P != NP (there are problems that are easy to verify but not easy to solve), while “yes” means P = NP (if a solution is easy to check, the problem must be easy to solve). So I am saying most people and most scientists believe P != NP exactly as you say.
Reading comprehension is hard my bad.
Edit: wait no, it’s “easy” I’m just dumb.
That’s actually the simplest and clearest description of the P/NP problem I’ve ever read.
I’m an IT auditor. “What the fuck?” is the main question, we ask it daily
It’d be interesting to see that answered scientifically.
I work in IT and haven’t had to go through an audit yet knocks wood
Any war stories you can share?
Mostly cybersecurity strugles. If you invest millons in a castle with a gigantic lock and a pit full of piranas, would you leave the service entrance open and give everyone in town the key? Yeah, more commom than not.
But an IT audit is only necessary if your company goes public or is the owner wants it, maybe if you are a tech company.
I do other audits, mostly safety and environmental, and my big question is usually “nobody made you write this, why would you write this down if you don’t want to do it?”
Can you explain? Are you referring to catching people doing stuff they shouldn’t have been doing?
there are 2 types of rules, or controls as we call it: Legal requirements and internal policies. The first one is clear there are legal requirements in place and you have to be in compliance with. The second one is where I get the most wtfs. Internal policies are rules the company itself crated and said had to be followed. For example let’s say you are the IT manager of your company and you discover that everyones password to you system is 1234. You go out and look for market best practices and create a policy saying “All passwords must contain 6 numbers and 2 letters”. For this to be official you write it down and “publish” it internally.
Now, me as an auditor go there, look at the rule you created and check if it’s really in place or if you just wrote because. A lot of times it’s not. The company creates the rule but forgets or just postpone implementing it
For most regulations, the laws and rules say something like “companies must ensure X doesn’t happen”, and the companies themselves have to come up with a way to do that.
Let’s say the law says “companies that transport apples must be able to show which batch went where”.
Company A says “to comply with the law, whenever we move a shipment, we store the shipping order on our computers”
Company B says “to comply with the law, the truckdriver will film the place they left, count the apples when leaving, then email the entire dashcam trip, and count the apples on arrival”.
Neither process is wrong, they both follow the law. But when I go to Company B, I promise you they’re going to fail the audit. They’re (probably) not doing anything illegal, but they’re going to fail their audit because no truckdriver is going to count a truck full of apples.
They made that rule, and they really didn’t have to.
Oh so so much of "dude you mande this rule up, you reviewd this document, why is this process nothing like this?!
Probably not the most complex, but in programming, the salesman problem: intuitive for humans, really tough for programming. It highlights how sophisticated our brains are with certain tasks, and what we take for granted.
Also, related xkcd.
I once accidentally worked myself into trying to solve the traveling salesman problem. I was doing some work on a very specific problem, and I got to a point where I couldn’t figure out a way to efficiently link up a bunch of points. The funny thing is that I knew about the TSP, but I just didn’t realize that the problem I was trying to solve was a case of the TSP. After a couple of days trying to figure it out, I realized what it was, and that it was futile.
It was a good lesson to always try to find the most abstracted version of the problem you are trying to solve cause someone smarter has either tried and failed or tried and succeeded.
I think it’s dark matter. There are so extremely many theories around it and it’s very hard to measure experimentary.
Ya’ll think you have real unsolved problems. I’m here with “naming variables” (⌐■_■).
we become programmers because we lack creativity. my brain short circuits when i have to come up with something other than “foo”, “bar”, or maybe even “baz”
I have the opposite problem, my variables are sometimes too descriptive. I even annoy myself at times with VariableThatDoesThisOneThing and VariableThatDoesDifferentThing just because I want to be able to come back later and not wonder what I was smoking.
Programming is quite literally creative problem solving, so I doubt that programmers lack creativity.
Problem solving, of course, but creative writing, composition, and art… not my cup of tea.
As a software engineering researcher, I strongly agree. SE research has studied code comprehension for more than 40 years, but for that amount of time, we know surprisingly little about what makes really high-quality code. We are decent in saying what makes very bad code, though, but beyond extreme cases, it’s hard to come to fairly general statements.
Genuinely curious - what do we know makes code very bad?
A few bad things in code for which we have fairly consistent evidence:
- high nesting depth
- meaningless or single-letter variable names
- lots of code duplication
- very inconsistent formatting
- very complicated Boolean conditions with AND and OR
- functions with a lot of parameters
How to get supervisors, superintendents, school boards, and even politicians to let teachers teach. It’s understood that overtesting reduces learning. It’s understood that rigid curriculums don’t work, and you really should be tailoring lessons to the capabilities of the class. All kinds of educational philosophy is understood well and in depth… but being permitted to apply any of it?
As someone who does hiring for tech, the problem is things are metric driven. You can’t extract metrics from letting teachers “teach their own way” without standardized tests, and if you don’t have metrics, you don’t know if “teaching their own way” is working in practice (you can extend this logic down to understand the rigid ciriculums).
By the way, I think this is all bullshit, but that’s why
I watched two twelve-year-old children take a four-hour reading exam today. They ran out of time without finishing. Please can North Carolina to get their metrics some other way.
My current theory is that the state of NC so wants to say that public schools are failing that they are giving students near impossible exams.
Oh yeah, I fully understand why the stupidity happens/happened. I don’t know how to fix it or if it can be fixed… that’s why I posted it here, in the unsolved problems in your field thread!
I have a question about rigid curriculums. This is mostly for high school. Many of my teachers had curriculums and syllabi that they had been using for years and kept them basically the same, and then there were the AP classes where the curriculum was determined by the AP exam. I felt that I learned really well in AP classes and we would get through much more advanced material in the AP classes than in others. And I also felt that the teachers who had developed somewhat fixed curriculums from experience taught much more efficiently than those who hadn’t. It never felt like the teachers were changing their curriculum for each class whether it was an AP class or not because most had their curriculums kind of figured out over the course of teaching for many years. And most of the teachers I had in high school were excellent. So my question is, why is it believed that rigid curriculums don’t work? Because in my schooling experience, whether the rigid curriculum was developed by the individual teacher or by an external organization (like AP), the class seemed to benefit from having fixed goals for the year.
field of study’s
“fields of study”.
Yea, because “What’s your fields of study most complex, unanswered question” is a perfect english sentence
No, just a misplaced comma. “What is your field of study’s most complex unanswered question?”
My brother works in molecular biology; he tells me the field’s understanding of peptides have only just begun and it’s only through machine learning that they are now starting to make progress. 99% seem to be post-translational garbage, the other 1% is likely to be the basis of a revolution of treatment options.
I work in computational biophysics. The field has been slowly chipping away at the structure and function of every protein for decades (it’s a solvable problem, it’s just going to take a lot of time and energy) and recently a bunch of clueless SF tech bros have bumbled their way into the field and declared that they’ve solved everything.
What do you think about alphafold? It’s been years since I’ve heard about it and am no longer in that space.
Yeah, I get the same impression from my brother; he’s active on the science side of the field (recently published in Nature Communications about AI and peptides) and his pet hate is Kurzweil and their ilk.
How does immunology work?
Pro tip: nobody understands immunology and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying
After covid, this strikes me as a dangerous thing to say. Are you an immunologist and could you expound on this?
My field of expertise is bacterial pathogenesis with a particular interest in pneumococcal pneumonia.
And it’s true, immunology is ridiculously complex that no one person can ever hope to fully understand it. Immune cells are helpful or detrimental depending on the context, and sometimes even both. And we don’t really fully know why. The problem is that pathogens and humans have been in an evolutionary arms race for billions of years, and unraveling all of that evolutionary technical debt is Fun™
To give an example, Toll-like receptors are one of the most important pathogen-detection mechanisms, and they were discovered just about 25 years ago and people only really figured out their importance about 20 years ago. There are researchers who have spent the majority of their careers before the discovery of one of the most crucial immune pathways.
We really don’t know what’s going on with immunology and to say otherwise is, as I’ve said, an outright lie. People seem to overestimate how much we know about the immune system, not knowing that we are still very much in the “baby phase” of immune research. The fact that we are able to do so much already is really kind of a testament to human ingenuity than anything
My personal experience is that people who claim to know completely about how the immune system works is more likely to be a science denier (or more likely, naive)
Thanks, that was a great answer! I had no idea it was so complicated. I was definitely in the naive camp there.
Predictability in a chaotic system across various scales of time and space.
No one really knows how osmosis works.
Isn’t it just water carrying stuff across a concentration gradient?
No? Water can’t carry anything across the membrane.
Oh. Then how does the stuff get across the membrane? Does the membrane allow stuff to move over a concentration gradient without the water?
Gravity is just stuff falling, but there’s complexity there, as well.
I had to derive osmotic pressure for my statistical mechanics exam in my bachelor’s. So in what sense don’t we know?
We don’t know what molecular mechanism creates the pressure.
I’m only a professional scientist in the loosest sense of the term but for years we’ve tried to figure out why Joe can’t leave the break room to fart and who the fuck does he think he is?
He’s the president!
