When editor-in-chief Moshe Vardi asked me to write this piece for Communications, my first reaction was the article could be written in two words: Still open.

When I started graduate school in the mid-1980s, many believed that the quickly developing area of circuit complexity would soon settle the P versus NP problem, whether every algorithmic problem with efficiently verifiable solutions have efficiently computable solutions. But circuit complexity and other approaches to the problem have stalled and we have little reason to believe we will see a proof separating P from NP in the near future.

via Communications of the ACM.

this is a must-see.

Were the ancients in the habit of reading silently, or did they normally read out loud? Three weeks ago, discussing certain famous passages in St Augustine's Confessions, I mentioned that St Ambrose's habit of silent reading was clearly unique to him and a novelty to Augustine when he encountered it in Milan. Soon afterwards I received a letter from Myles Burnyeat of All Souls, Oxford. "I fear," says Professor Burnyeat, "you are one of numerous victims of a widespread myth, a serious misreading of Augustine. Since it has been a minor mission in my life to combat this myth, I take the liberty of enclosing two articles designed to set the record straight."

via The Guardian.

The deadly baby cobra on the loose at New York's Bronx Zoo has everyone wondering -- how do you catch a 20-inch-long, pencil-thin snake that can squeeze into the tiniest crack or crevice? Snake experts, known as herpetologists, tell FoxNews.com that finding the months-old female Egyptian cobra is no easy task.

"Snakes are escape artists," said Rulon Clark, a biology professor at San Diego State University. "It's tough. Their bodies are compressible and can fit in extremely small openings."

The missing cobra, who weighs less than 3 ounces, disappeared from her enclosure Friday inside the zoo's Reptile House. Zoo officials say they are confident the snake is not in an area accessible to the public and have put in place a tracking system to monitor its movement, though zoo director Jim Breheny did not elaborate on the plan.

via FoxNews.com.

 

 

At the Bronx Zoo, "staffers were waiting Sunday for an escaped, poisonous Egyptian cobra to get hungry enough to come out of hiding." (The Daily News.) They think it's still in an area protected from the public.

via NPR.

IF YOU fly from Hong Kong to Frankfurt or Paris and look suspiciously like a gadget lover, chances are that you will be searched by customs officers: an iPad with Wi-Fi and 16 gigabytes of memory costs $200 less in the former British colony than in Germany and France. Given the risk of having to pay extra duty and the price of the flight, potential iPad buyers in both countries ought to consider a trip to nearby Luxembourg, where Apples popular device is $35 cheaper. The sales tax is only one reason for such differences in price. Consumers in Hong Kong also get a better deal because iPads are assembled in mainland China. Buyers in Switzerland have to pay more because there is less competition between retailers. In China and Mexico, the device may be cheaper because people are poorer. Incidentally, if income is taken into account, consumers in Luxembourg get the best deal: they only have to spend about 0.8% of the city-states GDP per person on an iPad.

via The Economist.