This video has stuck in my mind since I watched it, so I’m writing it down.
In it, Prime from The PrimeTime walks through a claim from OpenAI: a faster way of solving 3-SAT, one of the classic hard problems in computer science, fast enough that it would break what’s called the Exponential Time Hypothesis. It isn’t a proof that P equals NP. It’s still a long way from that. But it’s the kind of result most people assumed we’d never see, and the video makes the point that one crack in a hard problem can lead to the next.
Why It Stuck With Me
Things are crazy right now with hacking. I never thought I’d see PHP on mainstream news, but the PHP2Shell flaws got there in October. Then at the start of November, supermarket freezers across Europe were hacked and set to around 50°C. Freezers.
What’s coming next is the unknown, and it’s a bit scary. This video adds to that. It shows that even the hardest problems in the world might be resolved one day.
The Unimaginable
The big one is encryption. A lot of the internet rests on maths that is easy to check and practically impossible to reverse. RSA keeps connections and keys safe, and hashes like SHA-2 sit underneath passwords and software updates. If P ever turned out to equal NP, that guarantee would be in question. That’s unimaginable. But so were the maths problems in this video, and so were a few of the things Prime talks about.
I don’t know what comes next. I just know I’m paying more attention than I used to.
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