Nature:
In 2000 the Clay Mathematics Institute announced it would give
$1 million to whomever solved any of seven difficult math
problems. So far, only one of the Millennium Prizes, the
Poincaré Conjecture, has been cracked, although the
victor, Grigori Perelman,
declined
the prize money. Now, as
Nature's Geoff Brumfiel reports, Vinay Deolalikar, a
researcher at Hewlett-Packard, claims he has solved another of
the prize problems: Whether one kind of difficult-to-solve
computation,
NP (for non-polynomial), can be broken down into
another, easier-to-solve kind of computation called
P (for polynomial). Deolalikar's proof says no.
