tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3722233.post6236407197852208789..comments2024-03-18T17:27:11.613-05:00Comments on Computational Complexity: A Problem with Wikipedia and the Next Best Thing to Winning a Godel PrizeLance Fortnowhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06752030912874378610noreply@blogger.comBlogger13125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3722233.post-33764626660061383292010-11-14T15:20:57.706-06:002010-11-14T15:20:57.706-06:00Ambrosiac.
THANKS- I have made the correction.
It...Ambrosiac.<br /><br />THANKS- I have made the correction.<br />It was MY copying Wikipedia incorrectly,<br />not their fault.<br /><br />Do you have a REFERENCE for any of those folks having proven this?GASARCHnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3722233.post-74628075079232785022010-11-13T20:32:55.342-06:002010-11-13T20:32:55.342-06:00The recursive inseparability result probably goes ...The recursive inseparability result probably goes back to Kleene, Rosser, Novikov and maybe Trakhtenbrot.<br /><br />BTW the sets as given don't seem to be disjoint. Simpler to use<br /><br />[e: phi_e(e) converges to 0]<br /><br />[e: phi_e(e) converges to 1]ambrosiachttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17028712982003305671noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3722233.post-18853740341489478432010-11-13T20:27:28.453-06:002010-11-13T20:27:28.453-06:00Anonymous says: I know of at least one fields meda...Anonymous says: <i>I know of at least one fields medalist who has contributed a lot to wikipedia.</i><br /><br />An amazingly and gratifyingly large fraction of the wikipedia entries relating to differential geometry, algebraic geometry, and dynamical flows are outstandingly well-written.<br /><br />I have often wondered whether there might be an anonymous, modern-day "wikiBourbaki" / "Scarlet Pimpernell" / "Wonder Woman" / "Lone Ranger" that is keeping an eye on these entries.John Sidleshttp://www.mrfm.orgnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3722233.post-82532072971424646402010-11-13T18:46:48.368-06:002010-11-13T18:46:48.368-06:00@last anon, probably one of the best comments i ha...@last anon, probably one of the best comments i have come across so far.<br />i like the public toilet analogy. <br /><br />very nice.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3722233.post-78987123239827364332010-11-12T03:58:42.603-06:002010-11-12T03:58:42.603-06:00Wikipedia is full of abusive editors, administrato...Wikipedia is full of abusive editors, administrators and vandals. It is a sad thing, despite of its use. If they followed their own policies, things would be OK. However a couple of biased editors can do a lot of harm, especially when they are given authority that is too often in proportion to their incompetence. A good article is often replaced by a mediocre (or worse) edits by arrogant nobodies with surplus of free time and lack of intelligence. It is like a public toilet, that can be useful in case of urgent diarrhea, but you have to endure a lot of suspicious mess - using it is like sitting on a warm toilet seat, you can't help but wonder who was there before.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3722233.post-11002133779690557352010-11-11T16:29:32.979-06:002010-11-11T16:29:32.979-06:00Please do edit the entry with the misleading citat...Please do edit the entry with the misleading citation to indicate properly that is is not your result: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Be_bold<br /><br />However, please do not remove the citation to your survey unless you find a more appropriate citation to replace it with. Even then, it may be good to keep both the primary source and a link to your survey. Citations are good, citations to surveys especially so. <br /><br />Not everyone who edits Wikipedia articles (even on technical subjects such as this) is competent to write or review proofs, and indeed proofs should only be included when they help improve the reader's understanding of the subject, not merely because they verify that some statement is true. So instead everything that is not just a trivial calculation should be backed up by a pointer to the literature, regardless of whether that pointer goes to the paper that deserves original credit for the statement.D. Eppsteinhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:David_Eppsteinnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3722233.post-63967261018701738472010-11-11T14:30:06.733-06:002010-11-11T14:30:06.733-06:00Oh dang, I hate the "You should go back to yo...Oh dang, I hate the "You should go back to your research (ie. hermit's cave), leave wikipedia to us idiots" thing. Wikipedia is a useful tool for mathematicians / computer scientists / etc. for the same reason that it is useful to other people. So please fix the mistakes; the rest of us sane people will thank you.<br /><br />ps. I know of at least one fields medalist who has contributed a lot to wikipedia.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3722233.post-83888558611870352522010-11-11T11:37:55.192-06:002010-11-11T11:37:55.192-06:00Wikipedia has scripts that spider the links on the...Wikipedia has scripts that spider the links on the site. If you take down your website it'll get logged and somebody would find an alternative source. Is there any reason to assume the author page has better longevity than yours? There's not much prevention you can do besides the archival work going on in the web.<br /><br />Regarding Wikipedia's preference against primary sources, they're allowed "with care, because it is easy to misuse them". Mathematical proofs are an edge case where you can verify the veracity directly within the proof. Contrast with, say, a physics paper where the data may have been fabricated. Thus the appearance in a news article at least suggests that people have been made aware of this paper, and if it seems outlandish have had a chance to respond (contrasted with an article in a little read publication that essentially nobody has ever been made aware of).Paulhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11679234404220837033noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3722233.post-43836880567235646082010-11-11T10:57:27.508-06:002010-11-11T10:57:27.508-06:00A person of your skill level would do more good fo...A person of your skill level would do more good for the world by doing actual research/writing, rather than worrying about wikipedia articles. The last thing the site needs is even more voluntary unpaid slave labor. About the links, they aren't meant to be about original discoverers of theorems but rather about verifying that the thing in question wasn't made up out of thin air. Ironically according to wikipedia ideology, a newspaper article about a theorem, written by some unqualified reporter, is a "more desirable" link than the actual paper the theorem comes from.Xamuelhttp://www.xamuel.comnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3722233.post-21843993624130845512010-11-11T10:30:07.558-06:002010-11-11T10:30:07.558-06:00The phenomenon of evanescent references is not uni...The phenomenon of evanescent references is not unique to Wikipedia, or even the modern era.<br /><br />An extreme example was described recently on the weblog <i>Entertaining Research</i> in a post titled <a href="http://mogadalai.wordpress.com/2007/10/11/the-case-of-the-curious-reference/" rel="nofollow"><i>The case of the curious reference</i></a>.<br /><br />The Landau-Lifshitz-Gilbert (LLG) equations describe the interaction of quantum magnetic moments with a local dissipative environment. Using the arxiv server's full-text search, we find there presently are 668 on-line preprints relating to the LLG equation ... and the rate at which new LLG articles appear is accelerating year-by-year. <br /><br />The ubiquitous interest in the LLG equation arises because almost any modern laboratory experiment and/or mechatronic apparatus---whether classical or quantum, macroscale or nanoscale---contains dozens of devices whose internal magnetodynamics is described by the LLG equation.<br /><br />But when we investigate the origins of the LLG equation, we find that they are shrouded in mystery. The original citation is frequently given as "T.L. Gilbert, A Lagrangian formulation of the gyromagnetic equation of the magnetic field, Phys. Rev. 100 (1955) 1243" (227 citations). <br /><br />Yet that 1955 citation does not exist ... for the very good mathematical reason that the state-space manifold S_2 has the wrong topology to be a cotangent bundle manifold ... such that Gilbert's claimed Lagrangian formulation, when worked-out in detail, is blocked by a topological obstruction.<br /><br />As it turns out, the LLG reference is to a conference-proceeding abstract, that in turn is associated to Gilbert's never-published 1955 thesis, which in Gilbert's own recent assessment, contains "a number of errors and misconceptions" that (in essence) are associated to the previously-mentioned topological obstruction.<br /><br />In summary, the LLG equation is physically correct and mathematically well-posed, but it cannot be derived by the (oft-cited) Lagrangian methods. For details, read the (highly entertaining) account on <i>Entertaining Research</i>. <br /><br />Can similar comedies-of-error happen in mathematics/TCS? Absolutely. Does the web make such comedies easier? Hmmmm ... probably not ... because the web makes it easy to publicize these mistakes .. and to cite historical examples of how readily even egregious errors can become embedded in STEM culture.John Sidleshttp://www.mrfm.orgnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3722233.post-25257788698853163852010-11-11T09:40:01.723-06:002010-11-11T09:40:01.723-06:00WRT (2), Wikipedia encourages not citing the origi...WRT (2), Wikipedia encourages <i>not</i> citing the original result: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research#Primary.2C_secondary_and_tertiary_sources<br />At least that's how I understand it.rgrighttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02991214367108471744noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3722233.post-85795487668303245592010-11-11T09:38:15.824-06:002010-11-11T09:38:15.824-06:00I’m not certain I completely understand your messa...I’m not certain I completely understand your message. Anyway, thank you for checking some of the off-site links on Wikipedia and finding them — as far as I can tell — in working order.<br /><br />As for the result you talk about under item 2: The reference to your writing does <i>not</i> attribute the result to you. It merely makes the result <i>verifiable</i>. Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia, not a scientific journal; the purpose of references is to make statements verifiable, not to mete out academic credit. So you <i>should not</i> remove the reference and call the result “folklore,” because nobody else can then check the truth of the statement, nor find an authority that has called the statement true (in this case, you).<br /><br />Of course, if you can find an even better reference than (Gasarch 1998, p. 1047), then by all means add it.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3722233.post-78346091180777178792010-11-11T09:27:54.608-06:002010-11-11T09:27:54.608-06:00There is no weakness in Wikipedia. It works becaus...There is no weakness in Wikipedia. It works because people like you spot mistakes in entries relevant to their interests and fix them; it converges very fast. The mistakes that stay there for a long time are in entries that nobody cares about.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com