Saturday, April 05, 2014

Macroscopic Quantum Effects and the P vs. NP Problem

This article on the Physics Archive blog cites a paper by Arkady Bolotin at Ben-Gurion University the premise of which is that the fact that we don't typically see quantum effects (like superposition of states) at the macroscopic level (roughly defined as those systems made up of a number of quantum particles above Avogadro's Number) may imply that P != NP.

https://medium.com/the-physics-arxiv-blog/7ef5eea6fd7a

I have only a dilettante's knowledge of either quantum physics or computational complexity theory, but this is a really interesting idea.

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