this post was submitted on 12 May 2024
38 points (97.5% liked)
Asklemmy
43899 readers
1029 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy π
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.