P vs NP is Elementary? No-- P vs NP is ON Elementary (original) (raw)

As I am sure you all know, the TV show Elementary (Premise- Sherlock Homes in Modern Day NY. He emails and Texts! Watson is a female! and...) had an episode that involved P vs NP in a big way. I think they would have been better off with a fictional problem (Bourbaki's conjecture in Recursive Algebraic Topology?) rather than a real problem that they could say rather odd things about.

  1. Sherlock Holmes doesn't know what the Mill. Prizes are. I thought most educated people did. Everyone I know knows about them. Could be the company I keep.
  2. The show indicates that `Solving P vs NP' means `showing P=NP' It never seems to dawn on them that maybe P is NOT NP.
  3. The show assumes that once P=NP is proven it will take a very short time to write a program to use it. If P=NP is true then I suspect taking the proof and making it work on real world problems would take several years.
  4. The show focuses on P=NP's implications for crypto. As Lance has pointed out in his book if P=NP then the benefits for society are GINORMOUS, and would dwarf the relatively minor problem of having to switch to private key (I agree with Lance for the long term, but I think the short term would be chaotic for security).
  5. The show refers to seven Mill problems. While this is technically correct they really should mention that one of them (Poincare's conj.) was already solved.
  6. They seem to think that algebraic geom would be used on P vs NP. If they were claiming it was being use to prove P NE NP then I would think of the Geometric Complexity Theory Program and be impressed. Since they were using it to work on P=NP I'm less impressed. If Alg Geom really is used to prove P=NP then I'll be impressed.
  7. How was the episode- I am a fan of the show in general, and this was a solid but not outstanding episode. I wonder if I knew less about P vs NP would I enjoy it more.
  8. They are talking about P vs NP on National TV! That's kind-of nice. Only danger is the overhype. If P NE NP is shown and this has no real world applications then the public may be confused. I suspect we won't have to worry about that for at least 300 years.