%0 Journal Article %J Physical Review D %D 2017 %T Fast optimization algorithms and the cosmological constant %A Ning Bao %A Raphael Bousso %A Stephen P. Jordan %A Brad Lackey %X

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.

%B Physical Review D %V 96 %P 103512 %8 2017/11/13 %G eng %U https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.08503 %N 10 %R 10.1103/PhysRevD.96.103512