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“Efficiently” has multiple meanings. In the context of P and NP, “efficiently” just means in P - it says nothing about how hard the algorithm would actually be to implement, nor how expensive the computation actually would be. O(n^100) is in P, but it’s thoroughly impractical in practice, even for the NSA.

Indeed, the authors who proved that primality testing was in P did so with, IIRC, an O(n^12) algorithm (with n being the number of bits), which is not much use in practice. Although, in that case the result was already widely suspected to be true, and fast, randomized (non-deterministic but highly accurate) polynomial-time algorithms were already known.



The primality test has been whittled down to O(n^6) ... it seems that solutions to problems in P with high degree always get optimized over time.

Also, even a O(n^100) sol'n is way better than O(2^n) since (usually) I can parallelize polynomial time algorithms to something more practical: e.g., http://cds.iisc.ac.in/faculty/vss/courses/PPP2014/projects/p...




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