Re:A Polynomial Time Bounded-Error Quantum Algorithm for Boo...
by duaneb on Wednesday July 22, 2015 @11:38PM
(#9933843)
Yea, but to my understanding the partial work done thus far does not apply to an understanding of the general case solution. Let's say there is a linear solution for some form--how does that help establish a lower bound on the general form?
Recognition of past work I can understand. But it seems like occam would argue with me against the use of some of the partial results without understanding why they would be useful.
It’s quite rare for a genuinely novel solution to a major problem in mathematics to spring up out of nowhere in the literature.
[1] Think of, eg, the Twin Prime conjecture (that there are infinitely many pairs of primes only 2 integers apart). For decades there was no progress on this problem, before Yitang Zhang published a paper last year proving that there were infinitely many primes less than a finite bound apart (70 million in his case). Then a horde of matheaticians attacked the problem using his & other new approaches to progressively reduce that large bound down to the point where it’s now been proven that there are infinitely many primes < 246 apart (according to the polymath group - I’m not sure whether this is a published result yet). The twin prime conjecture is in sight!