A scientist formulates a theory to fit data. An engineer designs a widget adhering to specifications. Discovering that proof, that theory, that design is often hard. But once they are found, we have good ways to verify they work.Discovery seems harder than verification. But is it really? That question underlies one of the biggest open problems in computer science, that of P versus NP.NP is the class of problems for which we have an efficient method to check a solution is correct. Finding the needle in the haystack is inefficient if we must exhaustively search every stalk. But it’s easy to...…A scientist formulates a theory to fit data. An engineer designs a widget adhering to specifications. Discovering that proof, that theory, that design is often hard. But once they are found, we have good ways to verify they work.Discovery seems harder than verification. But is it really? That question underlies one of the biggest open problems in computer science, that of P versus NP.NP is the class of problems for which we have an efficient method to check a solution is correct. Finding the needle in the haystack is inefficient if we must exhaustively search every stalk. But it’s easy to...WW…