With Web 2.0 tools, such as (micro)blog, wiki, we can reveal a lot of our thoughts and opinions in public, and get response from someone we have never met before. More importantly, Web 2.0 tools encourage open discussions. Here is a very good example.
I saw from twitter that someone had claimed P!=NP was proved, which is an open problem in computer science for around 40 years (see this wiki entry). Many people wanted to solve it but none was successful. I reposted this message on my twitter here. In a couple of days, I saw more posts about this claim, which led me to this blog. The owner of the blog is Dick Lipton, a Professor of Computer Science at Georgia Tech, who have worked in the area of theory of computation since 1973. He revealed his thoughts on the proof of the claim in these blog entries: 1, 2, 3. And in each entry, you can see more than 100 responses, including the ones from brilliant mathematicians such as Terence Tao:
Previously, such serious discussions in very hard theoretical problems may only happen in the small grounds of top talents via emails or letters, of which the general public might never learn. But I think Prof. Dick Lipton’s blog has changed this. I am very glad to see this development, and hope to see more scientists participating in open discussions of open problems like this. Overall, such effort will increase the awareness of scientific research in the general public, and even increase the speed of cracking very difficult problems.
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