As someone who has an interest in this kind of thing, but very little in the way of formal education on it (my last formal maths education was my 'A' levels around 25 years ago), I'm possibly the exact target audience for this article.
Given that, I thought it was very helpful. I've read a whole host of attempts to explain it before, and they rapidly descend into 1000 other mathematical concepts that I don't fully understand and end up reading about instead of the actual P v NP issue.
The one bit that I think is missing is a better explanation of what's meant by "easy" in this context. Clearly a problem that takes more than the life of the universe to solve is likely to classify as hard. But what about if it was solvable in a year, or a minute, or a second? My vague understanding is that there's not really a "less than 5 seconds to solve"-type cutoff, and that it's actually to do with "nondeterministic polynomial time". But at that point I disappear into one of the mathematical things that I don't really grasp.
I would offer a suggestion, but I just had another go on the Wikipedia version and I honestly don't have a clue what it's telling me. I think I get what non-deterministic means, but then I'm totally flummoxed as to what that has to do with problems whose solution can be quickly verified.
Given that, I thought it was very helpful. I've read a whole host of attempts to explain it before, and they rapidly descend into 1000 other mathematical concepts that I don't fully understand and end up reading about instead of the actual P v NP issue.
The one bit that I think is missing is a better explanation of what's meant by "easy" in this context. Clearly a problem that takes more than the life of the universe to solve is likely to classify as hard. But what about if it was solvable in a year, or a minute, or a second? My vague understanding is that there's not really a "less than 5 seconds to solve"-type cutoff, and that it's actually to do with "nondeterministic polynomial time". But at that point I disappear into one of the mathematical things that I don't really grasp.