A researcher at HP, Vinay Deolalikar , has published a paper purporting to prove that P != NP. Awesome! I hope it’s correct and that he is awarded the Millennium Prize promptly for clearing this up. This is a seriously impressive thing to do. I got lost in the third paragraph of the abstract.

So what does this mean to programmers? Not much. Because we never believed that P == NP could be true in the first place.

Still, it’s nice to have confirmation.

Computer Science students can now stop looking for a linear solution to the Traveling Salesman problem, and go back to flirting on Facebook debating Java vs. C# on CodeProject.com.