Wednesday 23 March 2011

Life is (at least) NP-Hard

We have a very large number of experiences that we can fit into our lives. Certainly many more than is possible to fit in.

Assigning a value of (v) to each of our (n) possible experiences and a cost (t) of how much of our life it would take to gain that experience, the problem of life is to choose which experiences to fill our life with out of the O(n!) combinations that exist.

If we had a solution to this, it would obviously be a solution to the knapsack problem. Therefor life is NP-Hard.


FURTHER COMPLICATIONS:

Indeed, if we consider that this is an online problem, with constantly changing opportunities each leading to a different but unknown future set of opportunities and further complicate our model with the exclusivity of certain experiences (cannot be the pope and married, etc) this problem becomes even more difficult. Perhaps it's exp-space. Perhaps it's unsolvable...

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