Sandra and Woo 0671 - 0680 (D)
Sandra and Woo 0671
The Last Panel
This strip is an homage to Luigi Serafini's groundbreaking art book Codex Seraphinianus, first published in 1981. The Codex is is an illustrated encyclopedia of an imaginary world and written in a cipher alphabet in an imaginary language. The 360 pages long book resembles the Voynich manuscript, which was the inspiration for our strip #500, The Book of Woo, in serveral regards.
Sandra and Woo 0672
Mortal Kombat
Although I'm a software developer, I've done only two strips about computer science resp. programming so far: Software Engineering, Now With Cats! and Cassandra. I hope you understand that I wanted to do a couple of strips about the topic eventually. This is the first of four strips in the series.
Richard's and Melody's t-shirts are about the P versus NP problem, the major unsolved problem in computer science. Here is a short explanation of the problem:
There is a class of decision problems, such as the travelling salesman problem, that can be solved by well-known algorithms. But all these algorithms need exponential time to find the solution, for example 2100 = 1,267,650,600,228,229,401,496,703,205,376 steps. This is, obviously, a lot and can't be computed even on modern computers. After finding such a solution, only polynomial time is needed to verify that the solution is correct, for example 1002 = 10,000 steps. This is usually very easy for a modern computer.
It is still an open question if algorithms exist that can also solve these decision problems in polynomial time. This would be a major breakthrough in computing and would make it possible to calculate exact results where only approximate solutions can be calculated today.
Richard thinks that this is possible, i.e. P == NP, while Melody thinks that this is impossible, i.e. P != NP.
