Synthesis is harder than analysis • Hacker News Board

Re: Synthesis is harder than analysis

#41

Post by teiferer » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 6:04 AM UTC

ykonstant wrote: post #23

teiferer wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's quite straight forward to identify that too.

Not always. As an exercise, try to find a continuous real function which is differentiable if and only if the Riemann hypothesis is true!

Easy. Let f be a continuous real function that is not differentiable somewhere. Let H be the truth value of the Riemann hypothesis. Define g(x) as "f(x) if not H else 0". Boom.

Reminds me of a homework exercise in theory of computation back in my uni days. Is the function "f(x) is 0 if H else 1" computable? Of course it is. It is either constant 0 or constant 1. We don't know which at this point, but f is a constant function in either case, so it is surely computable.

Re: Synthesis is harder than analysis

#42

Post by DoctorOetker » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 1:18 PM UTC

andrewflnr wrote: post #40

DoctorOetker wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

careful what you wish for

Oh please. Do it then. It's just as easy as multiplication, right? Because otherwise it wouldn't have made any sense to bring it up. So go for it. If you don't want to be evil and MitM online banking sessions, publish the algorithm and collect your Turing award at your earliest convenience. Unless, perhaps, it is a bit harder, as said in the post you first responded to.

this assumes a Turing award to be the highest possible reward, and ignores that a non-insignificant fraction of contributors are driven by a sense of justice and concomittant need to grab power, the reward you describe is inferior to the reward I ogle to grab.

Re: Synthesis is harder than analysis

#43

Post by andrewflnr » Mon, Jul 06, 2026, 5:30 PM UTC

DoctorOetker wrote: post #42

andrewflnr wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh please. Do it then. It's just as easy as multiplication, right? Because otherwise it wouldn't have made any sense to bring it up. So go for it. If you don't want to be evil and MitM online banking sessions, publish the algorithm and collect your Turing award at your earliest convenience. Unless, perhaps, it is a bit harder, as said in the post you first responded to.

this assumes a Turing award to be the highest possible reward, and ignores that a non-insignificant fraction of contributors are driven by a sense of justice and concomittant need to grab power, the reward you describe is inferior to the reward I ogle to grab.

Big talk for someone who isn't casually factoring 2048-bit RSA keys as easily as multiplying them.