TY - JOUR T1 - Fast optimization algorithms and the cosmological constant JF - Physical Review D Y1 - 2017 A1 - Ning Bao A1 - Raphael Bousso A1 - Stephen P. Jordan A1 - Brad Lackey AB -

Denef and Douglas have observed that in certain landscape models the problem of finding small values of the cosmological constant is a large instance of an NP-hard problem. The number of elementary operations (quantum gates) needed to solve this problem by brute force search exceeds the estimated computational capacity of the observable universe. Here we describe a way out of this puzzling circumstance: despite being NP-hard, the problem of finding a small cosmological constant can be attacked by more sophisticated algorithms whose performance vastly exceeds brute force search. In fact, in some parameter regimes the average-case complexity is polynomial. We demonstrate this by explicitly finding a cosmological constant of order 10−120 in a randomly generated 109 -dimensional ADK landscape.

VL - 96 U4 - 103512 UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.08503 CP - 10 U5 - 10.1103/PhysRevD.96.103512 ER -