Laakeri

I'd say it instead makes it more precise, indicating that they are uncertain but the range is from several hours to days.

But he made a good living out of it, so in the end it was a good idea?

I completely agree with you. My point was that the P vs NP distinction matters in practice, but of course also the subquadratic vs quadratic time distinction matters a lot.

What are examples of natural graph related problems in P with absurd exponents? I think the reason they don't get attention is not that the algorithms are not practical, but that the problems are not natural. Really, the only examples of such problems I can think of are something like "Finding a clique of size 222222 is in P because we can try all possibilities in n^222222 time".

I'm not sure if its really misunderstanding, when in 99% cases it has turned out that if a problem is in P, then it has a polynomial-time algorithm with a quite small exponent.

"Luck favors the prepared mind"

For binary-encoded input it is in 2-EXPTIME by trying all graphs of size exponential in the input number and testing all subsets of the given size. Would be surprising if any hardness result for complexity classes would be known.

I read the essay, and my takeaway to "There are for example four fundamental forces. Are we going to find another four?" would be:

Maybe not, but we could find out that the model of fundamental forces wasn't really the final answer, and explain the universe much better with some alternative theory. In your comment you assume that science is more or less settled, and all there is to do is to tweak the present understanding a bit and fill some gaps. The same sentiment was shared by many prominent physicists already in the end of 1800s, who were obviously proved wrong by Einstein and others in the 1900s.

It's enough to just take one random element and use it as a pivot.

For example Google hires mostly generalists and lots of people who care about income and career progression work there.

Red Bull is not a sponsor but the owner of the team

Well, it is also not proved to not be NP-hard, so it could also be NP-hard to our current knowledge. But you are right that researchers believe that it's not NP-hard.

I don't know, he was a co-founder of computer science.