Chris Jefferson
@heathercafe.bsky.social
AI Professor in St Andrews, currently visiting CSU, China. Lover of puzzles, plushies and programming.
If P=NP, but the polynomial is "large", it wouldn't really be practically useful. But how large is "large"?
Smaller than you might expect. If P=NP, but it takes n^12 time to solve a problem on n bits, then if we ran a billion 4Ghz CPUs for a million years, they wouldn't break 512-bit encryption.
Smaller than you might expect. If P=NP, but it takes n^12 time to solve a problem on n bits, then if we ran a billion 4Ghz CPUs for a million years, they wouldn't break 512-bit encryption.
July 7, 2025 at 12:07 PM
If P=NP, but the polynomial is "large", it wouldn't really be practically useful. But how large is "large"?
Smaller than you might expect. If P=NP, but it takes n^12 time to solve a problem on n bits, then if we ran a billion 4Ghz CPUs for a million years, they wouldn't break 512-bit encryption.
Smaller than you might expect. If P=NP, but it takes n^12 time to solve a problem on n bits, then if we ran a billion 4Ghz CPUs for a million years, they wouldn't break 512-bit encryption.