Too Geeky for my own good

Last night we watched a new series called Numb3rs and despite being annoyed by the ad breaks (what possessed me to watch it in realtime and not off the PVR is beyond me) it was a pretty good show. For those who haven't seen it yet here's a short synopsis :-

High up FBI guy (Brother 1) gets stuck on cases enlists help of Maths
Genius (Brother 2) to derive equations to model behaviour. Bleedingly
obvious strokes of genius provided by Father of Brother 1 and 2
to ultimately catch bad guys.

Although it sounds pretty ordinary it's actually quite well done and has been a pretty good replacement for our normal Monday night viewing of Desperate Houswives.

In the episode screened last night the Maths guy lost the plot and started working on a problem 'P vs NP'. It was at this point I felt my geek (inner maths geek that is) rising to the surface with a sudden urge to go and discover the basis of the problem, as it wasn't really explained during the episode. I did manage almost 24 hours before I ended up googling it... But for those who are interested :-

The P versus NP problem is the determination of whether all NP-problems are actually P-problems. If P and NP are not equivalent, then the solution of NP-problems requires (in the worst case) an exhaustive search, while if they are, then asymptotically faster algorithms may exist.
Taken from mathworld.wolfram.com

Specifically in the show the Maths guy was dealing with the problem in terms of the game Minesweeper.

The object of Minesweeper is to avoid all the hidden mines on a square grid. When you click on a grid, you either find a mine (and lose) or get a number showing how many mines are in the squares around the one you just clicked. Kaye realized that this was exactly the kind of problem described by Stephen Cook back in 1971 and now referred to as P vs. NP.

from Geek.com

So consider yourself enlightened!