Timeline for Preferred Conciseness of Contributions
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
25 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Apr 13, 2017 at 12:58 | history | edited | CommunityBot |
replaced http://mathoverflow.net/ with https://mathoverflow.net/
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| Mar 17, 2017 at 10:13 | history | edited | CommunityBot |
replaced http://meta.mathoverflow.net/ with https://meta.mathoverflow.net/
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| Jan 2, 2014 at 5:22 | comment | added | Manfred Weis | Thanks for the pointer to the article; I will read it carefully and check whether it answers my reference request (i.e. whether a distinction between Integer Programming and Linear Integer Programming is not relevant in that respect). | |
| Jan 2, 2014 at 0:03 | comment | added | Kaveh | You may want to check this somewhat related article by Lipton and Regan: How Not To Prove Integer Factoring Is In P | |
| Jan 2, 2014 at 0:01 | comment | added | Kaveh | I can't recall any particular literature off my head, I am not very familiar with research going on IP solvers like CPLEX, I am more familiar with research going on SAT solvers and factoring (also other cryptographic problems) is one of the interesting test cases to try to experiment with. There are various formulations and should be easy to find with Google. I think people working on IP solvers should have done similar things for IP. I think you should look for articles about practical IP solvers and their performance. | |
| Jan 1, 2014 at 12:16 | comment | added | Manfred Weis | @Kaveh thank you for explaining to me the reasons for your point of view; that is perfectly acceptable to me and I appreciate it very much. I had hoped for such a feedback earlier after posting my problem and, I also still hope for a pointer to literature, where solving integer factorization with IP has been investigated as an option. If that has already been done before, then there is no need for further investigation, otherwise it may be worth the effort. | |
| Jan 1, 2014 at 0:48 | comment | added | Kaveh | ps: express multiplication $xy=z$ as an IP and the rest is straightforward. Another easy way is to pick a formulation of factoring as SAT (there are several of them) and turn it into an IP using the reduction from SAT to IP. | |
| Jan 1, 2014 at 0:47 | comment | added | Kaveh | the burden is on you to explain why it is more interesting than the obvious way of formulating factoring as an IP. If you don't know that it is straightforward to formulate factoring as an IP or can't explain why your formulation is interesting (theoretically or experimentally) in a way that a typical formulation would not be then IMO the question is off-topic. You say that you understand that the LP formulation will not necessarily give a correct answer, ok, so what does it give? How do you turn it into something meaningful? If you can't explain that then what is the point of LP formulation? | |
| Jan 1, 2014 at 0:46 | comment | added | Kaveh | I don't know your background but I should say that on the first look it looks like an amateur trying to promote or check publishable of some kind of algorithm for factoring. Your question hasn't got an answer because it is not clear what you are asking exactly. If I explain to you that it is easy to formulate factoring as IP would that answer your question? If you are claiming that you have found some new interesting formulation of factoring as an IP or LP | |
| Dec 30, 2013 at 16:05 | comment | added | Manfred Weis | OK, understood; my solution won't appear on MO and neither a link to anything I publish in that respect. | |
| Dec 30, 2013 at 15:03 | comment | added | Andy Putman | It doesn't matter whether sharing "new" knowledge is noble. That's simply not the purpose of MO (it also isn't meant to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, etc). Attempts at self-promotion will be downvoted, closed, and deleted. Please find some other venue (eg a blog) for this. | |
| Dec 30, 2013 at 13:28 | comment | added | Manfred Weis | @AndyPutman what then is the button "Answer your Question" good for; I thought that sharing new knowledge is a noble idea and, what is evil about checking first, whether something is already known, before providing it as an answer. I have checked the internet for a long time and also asked for references, both without result and so I guess my ideas could be new. | |
| Dec 30, 2013 at 11:13 | comment | added | Manfred Weis | @Kaveh please give your undergraduate students the task of formulating the integer factoring problem as either an IP or an LP and provide me their solutions so I can compare or, provide the missing pointer to the "other standard reductions from factoring to IP" | |
| Dec 30, 2013 at 11:08 | comment | added | Manfred Weis | @Kaveh I definitely don't confuse LP and IP; applying LP can give integer solutions in certain special cases, e.g. in case of total unimodularity or, for the matching problem. My MO question was asking for a reference to either IP or LP formulations and I got no feedback. Now I had already asked how to react to such a failed request and was encouraged to share my ideas; but how can I provide a better solution to something that doesn't exist. In my opinion an IP or LP formulation could give new means of studying the complexity of Factoring Problem - but apparently that isn't appreciated. | |
| Dec 30, 2013 at 8:54 | comment | added | Kaveh | ps: it seems to me that you have some confusion and misconception about understanding the difference between LP and IP, you cannot use Simplex or other LP algorithms to solve IP as that implies P=NP. | |
| Dec 30, 2013 at 8:50 | comment | added | Kaveh | As I commented under your question it is an undergraduate exercise (I literally mean it, I do give similar exercises to my students) to write any NP problem as an IP problem and prove the correctness of the reduction from the NP problem to IP. This is not research level unless you have very strong theoretical or experimental (e.g. breaking RSA factoring challenges) evidence to support that your reduction is considerably better than other standard reductions from factoring to IP. | |
| Dec 30, 2013 at 1:06 | comment | added | Andy Putman | (here's an example of an answer I wrote that referred to my own work and was well-received : mathoverflow.net/a/52407/317). | |
| Dec 30, 2013 at 1:05 | comment | added | Andy Putman | @TheMaskedAvenger : My guess is that it would be poorly received. It is fine to ask whether a specific thing is known (as long as it is at the appropriate level and you have done a reasonable literature search before asking), but in general I think that one should mention one's own work only in answers to other people's questions (and then only when it directly answers those questions, which is extremely rare). | |
| Dec 30, 2013 at 0:50 | comment | added | The Masked Avenger | @Andy, how would a question of the following form be received? "I have applied the following methods X,Y and Z in working on problem Q. A seemingly novel aspect is the (100 word description here). Is this aspect, or even the combination of X,Y and Z, addressed or discussed in the literature? For those wanting more detail, I have (linked PDF) available." | |
| Dec 29, 2013 at 19:06 | comment | added | Todd Trimble Mod | @AndyPutman That's a good point. There's really not enough information at hand to give more than somewhat generic advice. | |
| Dec 29, 2013 at 18:55 | comment | added | Andy Putman | I don't quite understand what you are planning to do, but it is inappropriate to use MO to publicize your work or to ask for feedback on a new theorem. This holds even if you have a sort of "fig-leaf" question -- it's usually pretty clear if a question is an honest query or a veil for self-promotion. | |
| Dec 29, 2013 at 18:30 | comment | added | Manfred Weis | Thanks for your advice, Todd. I will follow it and restrict my answer accordingly. | |
| Dec 29, 2013 at 17:08 | comment | added | Todd Trimble Mod | My gut feeling is this: given that Dima expressed some mild skepticism with regard to your question, it might be good to test the waters first by starting with the concise version. If the community is encouraging in the form of upvotes, you should feel free to edit in further information. (Your third paragraph suggests to me that maybe you are not 100% certain of the correctness or practical relevance, so maybe it would be good to hold back and get community feedback first, before launching on a longer disquisition.) | |
| Dec 29, 2013 at 15:49 | review | Close votes | |||
| Jan 6, 2014 at 3:12 | |||||
| Dec 29, 2013 at 14:51 | history | asked | Manfred Weis | CC BY-SA 3.0 |