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(I can't get no) satisfaction

Can SAT-solvers resolve dependency hell?

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Permanent link to this comic: https://xkcd.com/1987/

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$ ./scale18x_presentation.sh�** (scale18x_presentation) WARNING **: presentation contains recursion.

_

​

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P vs. NP

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The 7 Millennium Problems are:

  • P vs. NP Problem.
  • Riemann Hypothesis.
  • Yang–Mills and Mass Gap.
  • Navier–Stokes Equation.
  • Hodge Conjecture.
  • Poincaré Conjecture.
  • Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer Conjecture.

​

​

https://www.claymath.org/millennium-problems

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Some jargon...

  • P (polynomial time) is the set of problems that can be solved in polynomial time.
  • NP (nondeterministic polynomial time) is the set of problems whose solutions can be verified in polynomial time.

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Complexity

NP-Complete

NP

P

NP-Hard

P vs NP

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Consider the following...

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BUT WAIT SPONGEBOB

WE HAVE TECHNOLOGY

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Some NP-Complete Problems, indicating the reductions typically used to prove their NP-completeness

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THE PROBLEM IS HUMAN

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4 states of package management

Source: https://medium.com/@sdboyer/so-you-want-to-write-a-package-manager-4ae9c17d9527

Dependency resolver solves sudoku here

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Permanent link to this comic: https://www.xkcd.com/797/

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TL;DR: What can we be doing as a community?

  • Commit your lockfiles
  • Document your API’s + use semantic versioning�(see semver.org)
  • Communicate to your library authors when dependencies go out of date.
  • Provide your feedback to the package management maintainers

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Without requirements or design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.

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The End.

:q!

Permanent link to this comic: https://xkcd.com/1172/

Hyrum's Law

With a sufficient number of users of an API, it does not matter what you promise in the contract:

all observable behaviors of your system will be depended on by somebody.