Talk:Open problem

On 2005/9/11 this was seen in the article:

'Unfortunately, these problems were solved by faculty members, not by graduate students.'

Implying what? Faculty shouldn't have to do any work :)? Or is the intent to say that no graduate students were harmed/involved (in reference to common expression "no animals were harmed in the production of XYZ") in the solution?

http://laplace.compbio.ucsf.edu/~jchodera/pubs/pdf/protein-folding-problem.pdf << this Link is not working  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.176.67.163 (talk) 06:49, 24 February 2012 (UTC)

2007-02-8 Automated pywikipediabot message
--CopyToWiktionaryBot 10:13, 8 February 2007 (UTC)

Philosophy
Apart from science and maths, is philosophy considered to study open problems too? --Aeternus (talk) 12:41, 11 October 2009 (UTC)


 * Aren't all philosophical questions open problems? :) Tim Vickers (talk) 20:40, 12 October 2009 (UTC)

this page has a long history (2005), and it is basically itself an "open problem" of Wikipedia because its scope isn't well defined. The concept is journalistic, and Wikipedia articles on research questions used to be spammed (there was even a template at some point) by classifying "open problems" based on journalism. Basically, "open problem" contrasts with "excercise", i.e. a problem put to a student by an instructor, to which the instructor knows the answer. All research addresses "open problems", or else it wouldn't be research. Therefore this page, stripped of its journalistic aspirations, could just be a redirect to research.

Also, the distinction of "open problem" from a mere "dispute" or "controversy" isn't well-formed. The intention here is that an "open problem" is a problem for which "everyone agrees" that it is (a) well-formed and (b) unsolved, but in most cases, opinions may vary, e.g. some people will claim a solution rejected by others, or some people will claim that the supposed problem is just a semantic confusion. Therefore, the division of "scientific" open problems from simple disputes becomes artificial. The Middle East conflict may be cast in terms of an "open problem in political science", etc. --dab (𒁳) 15:24, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

Merger of Lists_of_unsolved_problems with Open_problem
I propose to merge Lists_of_unsolved_problems with Open_problem. I think that the lists can easily be given as a section of the main article, and the main article is of a reasonable size that the merging of the lists will not cause any problems as far as article size is concerned. Jamgoodman (talk) 15:49, 11 April 2019 (UTC)