So the history is actually really well described in crpgaddicts blog. First there was wizardry (basically all rpgs both in the us and japan are descendents of wizardry, some with the mixture of ultima). bard's tale is a wizardry clone (its wizardry in a city). Dungeon master is an attempt to make a better wizardry, taking advantage of the mouse and the amiga's graphics (its basically wizardry in real time). EotB is a dungeon master clone.
I played Bard's Tale as a kid. Sadly it was a pirated copy and I was missing some of the documentation.
I got stuck because I didn't realize you actually needed a bard to sit on a throne to get past a particular puzzle. Since I never leveled a bard, I never got past that...
Np hard problems aren't that hard to solve. I'm solving one right now actually for work (graph bi-partition using simulated annealing), and it doesn't even take that long.
Of course my algorithm isn't actually correct! Or if I had a correct algorithm it might be really fast but still not have polynomial growth. You need a proof.
This belies a misunderstanding of NP space. Any problem is easy to solve if the dataset being processed is small enough. Computers are wonderful at brute-forcing terrible solutions.
You need the proof to show it really works in all cases. However if the goal is some quick (non-exhaustive) verification, then why can't you just use the algorithm? (Ignoring the big constants, high degree polynomial issue siblings mention).
Either A, it doesn't work, showing the paper is incorrect. Or B it works, showing that even if it doesn't prove the paper fully correct, it shows that at least something interesting is going on.
I mean use it on an instance of the problem big enough that an exponential algorithm would take years and see if the new algorithm doesn't *. Either something interesting will happen or it won't.
* yes i am aware that this falls apart if there is a very high constant or the algo is n^1000.
It actually does make sense, and is an important idea in complexity theory. In general, the problem of proving an arbitrary claim in ZFC isn't computable (this is just Godel's incompleteness theorem). if you confine your claims to smaller languages, you get smaller complexity classes. For instance, the problem of proving things in the propostional calculus is called BSAT, and is the quintessential NP complete problem.
In general a nice way of thinking about what NP is are the set of formula that have polynomial time checkable proofs.
Computing the n-th Ramsey number R(n,n) is doable in exponential time. You can easily brute-force R(4, 4); a perfectly credible proof that takes exponential time! A credible proof must be verifiable in demonstrably finite time -- not necessarily polynomial.
Hard to find =/= hard to verify. Indeed that is the point of NP (which stands for "nondeterministic polynomial" time): solutions must be easy to check.
It's important to remember that P=NP doesn't just imply that P = NP; it implies that P = PH (the polynomial hierarchy). There are a whole series of much harder problems than NP that also are in P if P = NP.
Finding proofs is always at least NP hard! Remember, any proof is at least going to include some boolean phrase (this is true and that is true so we get such and such), which is just BSAT, an NP complete problem.
In other words, yes. It's very very unlikely.
It's often also very local. Everyone knows who some castes are like Patels and Nayars, but how many people in north india know that vellalars are relatively high caste (but not brahman) for instance. And of course the specific relationship between various castes can change village to village.
