Jordan, S.
, Bao, N.
, Lackey, B.
and Bousso, R.
(2017),
Fast optimization algorithms and the cosmological constant, Physical Review A
(Accessed October 15, 2025)
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Fast optimization algorithms and the cosmological constant
Published
Author(s)
, Ning Bao, Brad Lackey, Raphael Bousso
Abstract
Denef and Douglas have observed that in certain landscape models the problem of finding small values of the cosmological constant is a large instance of an NP-hard problem. The number of elementary operations (quantum gates) needed to solve this problem by brute force search exceeds the estimated computational capacity of the observable universe. Here we describe a way out of this puzzling circumstance: despite being NP-hard, the problem of finding a small cosmological constant can be attacked by more sophisticated algorithms whose performance vastly exceeds brute force search. In fact, in some parameter regimes the average-case complexity is polynomial. We demonstrate this by explicitly finding a cosmological constant of order 10^−120 in a randomly generated 10^9-dimensional ADK landscape.Citation
Physical Review A
Volume
96
Pub Type
Journals
Keywords
complexity theory, cosmology
Citation
Issues
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Created November 1, 2017, Updated August 1, 2019