New Book Explores the P-NP Problem by Shar Steed.
From the post:
The Golden Ticket: P, NP, and the Search for the Impossible, written by CCC Council and CRA board member, Lance Fortnow is now available. The inspiration for the book came in 2009 when Fortnow published an article on the P-NP problem for Communications of the ACM. With more than 200,000 downloads, the article is one of the website’s most popular, which signals that this is an issue that people are interested in exploring. The P-NP problem is the most important open problem in computer science because it attempts measure the limits of computation.
The book is written to appeal to readers outside of computer science and shed light on the fact that there are deep computational challenges that computer scientists face. To make it relatable, Fortnow developed the “Golden Ticket” analogy, comparing the P-NP problem to the search for the golden ticket in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, a story many people can relate to. Fortnow avoids mathematical and technical terminology and even the formal definition of the P-NP problem, and instead uses examples to explain concepts
“My goal was to make the book relatable by telling stories. It is a broad based book that does not require a math or computer science background to understand it.”
Fortnow also credits CRA and CCC for giving him inspiration to write the book.
Fortnow has explained the P-NP problem without using “…mathematical and technical commentary and even the formal definition of the P-NP problem….”
Now, we were talking about how difficult it is to explain topic maps?
Suggest we all read this as a source of inspiration for better (more accessible) explanations and tutorials on topic maps.
(I just downloaded it to the Kindle reader on a VM running on my Ubuntu box. This promises to be a great read!)