On 8/22/2012 2:44 PM, meekerdb wrote:
On 8/22/2012 4:36 AM, Stephen P. King wrote:
Hi Jason,
Nothing "in the theory" suggests that landscapes are a problem!
But that is kinda my point, we have to use meta-theories of one sort
or another to evaluate theories. Occam's Razor is a nice example...
My point is that explanations should be hard to vary and get the
result that one needs to "match the data" or else it is not an
explanation at all. One can get anything they want with a theory that
has landscapes. Look!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_theory_landscape
"The string theory landscape or anthropic landscape refers to the
large number of possible false vacua in string theory. The
"landscape" includes so many possible configurations that some
physicists think that the known laws of physics, the standard model
and general relativity with a positive cosmological constant, occur
in at least one of them. The anthropic landscape refers to the
collection of those portions of the landscape that are suitable for
supporting human life, an application of the anthropic principle that
selects a subset of the theoretically possible configurations.
In string theory the number of false vacua is commonly quoted as
10500. The large number of possibilities arises from different
choices of Calabi-Yau manifolds and different values of generalized
magnetic fluxes over different homology cycles. If one assumes that
there is no structure in the space of vacua, the problem of finding
one with a sufficiently small cosmological constant is NP complete,
being a version of the subset sum problem."
Boom, there it is! The computation problem!
NP-complete problems, or just N-problems, are ones that consume a lot
of computational resources for large problems. But the required
resources are finite and the problems are solvable. So what's the
problem?
Brent
--
It is all about how big the finite problems grow to and whether or
not their demand for resources can be kept up with the load. It seems to
me that Nature would divide up the labor into as many niches as possible
and have a distributed "on demand" system rather than a single top down
computation system.
--
Onward!
Stephen
"Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed."
~ Francis Bacon
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