The Limits of Search
An interesting perspective on generalized search, with an informal but convincing conjecture on fundamental limitations to search problems. (In a word, TANSTAAFL.) To wit:
If you’re going to find a needle in a haystack, then you’ve got to expend at least some computational effort sifting through the hay.
The author ties it in with computational complexity theory and the age-old question of whether P = NP:
Many people — even computer scientists — don’t appreciate just how profound the consequences would be if P=NP. They think it’s about scheduling airline flights better, or packing more boxes in your truck. Of course, it is about those things — but the point is that you can have a set of boxes such that if you could pack them into your truck, then you would also have proved the Riemann Hypothesis!
He postulates that these fundamental limitations constrain not only classical but also quantum computing, railing against the modern conception of quantum computers as generalized massively parallel solvers. All in all, quite an interesting perspective. Nothing fundamentally profound or groundbreaking here, but it all makes sense.