Summer of Math Exposition

What P vs NP is actually about

What if we could run algorithms backwards? We discuss how we could (possibly?) do this by turning them into circuits and turning those into satisfiability problems. If we could do that efficiently, it turns out crazy things would happen!

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7.6 Overall score*
44 Votes
12 Comments
Rank 1

Comments

Overall high quality content. You could improve on accessibility by adding visuals or examples to support your claims.

7.5

This is a great explination of the P / NP problem and shows a great way of explaining it. I have found this particular topic hard to understand before, but this is a very great and simple explination to follow and understand. Well done!

7.9

Motivation: Great hook, immediately drew me in with saying that P vs. NP is equivalent to running programs backwards. Love this framing! Clarity: Very clear explanation of what's going on, excellent use of graphics as well. Novelty/Memorability: I've never heard of this perspective on P vs. NP before, which made it both really interesting and really memorable. It's worth noting that I'm not much of a computer person myself, so I have no sense of whether this is a "standard" explanation or not, but I really enjoyed it! Well done.

9

This was an excellent video. The graphics were engaging. I liked the transitions from full screen animation vs. full screen on video. Perhaps the only suggestion for improvement would be there may be times you would want to show the presenter in a small screen while still showing the animation. Great math. A little above my level but it was interesting.

7

I appreciate the efforts being put into the video, but I don't know if this is necessarily an "unusual angle" as claimed, because my non-CS background always thought of P vs NP problem as whether an algorithm can be inverted. However, I have never heard of satisfiability before, so that's novel to me; but I see it as a more refined or a more formal way to define invertability.

5.7

I would just add that I need to know what the ñ stands for

8.7

Bravo bravo ! Adressing such an anbstract and difficult topic and making it accessible (or nearly accessible, I still have to work :-) is of great usefulness and generosity.

8.3

Great video explaining not only satisfiability but giving a great introduction into how if it was solved, the world would be in for a wild ride

9

Goal Orientation: 7/10 Novelty: 7/10 Thought-Provoking: 8/10 Comprehensibility: 10/10 Technological: 10/10 Overall Average: 8.4/10

7.6

This was one of the best explanations on why NP problems are equivalent. Simple, to the point, and at some points, extremely funny! Really great video overall, makes me want to check out every other single video in the channel.

8.2

Exelent, butiful exposition of exating topic. Some comments: 1. The framing is a bit confusing. it is not clear what does invert means from the beginning. I think it is better to go with something more conventional "solving problems if you know how to check the solution" 2. there is 1 point that is swiped under the rag - you explain why sat can solve any np problem for which there is a verifing formula. but not a general algorithm. It would be nice to have an explanation of this point. If you think it is out of the scope, it is OK to skeep it, but you should be clear about it.

8.1

Wonderful video! I learned a lot from it. Graphics, presentation, and pacing were on point, and I enjoyed the sprinkling of easter eggs in the form of fun little things playing on the computer monitor when the narrator was on camera. Trying to find something to critique is hard (NP-complete?), but maybe one spot in the video that I found a bit tough to grasp on first pass was the conversion of an AND gate into a SAT problem. It wasn't immediately clear to me why those three conditions described an AND gate's behavior, though it made sense to me when I translated the statements into "if-then" form: for example "c OR NOT f" is equivalent to "if NOT c then NOT f". Doing so for all three made it immediately clear to me how it's describing an AND gate's behavior. Perhaps starting with the "if-then" descriptions and then translating them into the language of ORs and NOTs might have been slightly better, but this is really just a nitpick. On the whole I really liked this way of looking at the P vs. NP problem, which is also a brave topic to cover as it's a popular topic. But I think your video adds something new and valuable to this space despite that, so bravo!!

9