@Thomas there are those who make things happen, those who watch things happen, and those who wonder what happened. so anyway how about emailing all those authors you mention with this link & invite them into this room for a new experiment in cyber collaborative peer review? :) vzn1.wordpress.com/chat/https://vzn1.wordpress.com/chat

@vzn That question is tough. Assume that I have trouble following the last line of the proof of Lemma 10 on page 18. Maybe I am just missing something obvious. Maybe this single line refutes the entire paper. At this point I already invested a significant amount of time reading the preceding 17 pages. What I personally want most in this situation is just any response from the author at all. Maybe I want to first think about it further for myself, before contacting the author.

Even for the public cyber collaborative peer review of the famous Vinay Deolalikar proof, the author itself didn't offer this sort of answer I hope for. Hence I still wonder what I should do (not with respect to this old Deolalikar proof, but with respect to the ambitious CCoR paper I have read myself recently).

@vzn, I've started coding that factorization program - I made an error (not syntax) in my prime number finder, so I'm working on that, but otherwise its going pretty well. Thinking about how to simplify the factorization once I get it.

Would this question be more appropriate here, on computer science, or on physics?

@ThomasKlimpel why is it a tough question? lets write a form letter and just invite authors of substantial claims in here. their nonresponse is not a problem. its a low effort proposition. no need to overthink it. if they respond, think everyone benefits. no need to try to anticipate/ forecast their eventual reaction/ response.

what kind of EE/ optical stuff does your dad work on?

@vzn As long as I have not yet invested any effort into the paper, it is indeed easy. As soon as I have invested a significant amount of time, I might prefer to get my answers first, before suggesting a public cyber collaborative peer review. And it would even be a "peer" review, because we are not Terry Tao or Dick Lipton (if you know what I mean). As soon as we read an ambitious paper outside our domain of specialization, we are just a curious audience.

So I will try your suggestions for the papers I only plan to read. Let's see what will happen.

@ThomasKlimpel you keep saying (elsewhere) youve invested serious effort into the paper(s). we are not claiming to have expert status. but its quite likely that stuff we trip over might be the same stuff that other reviewers trip over. its all voluntary. do not expect much response, but think the effort to ask is low & we will occasionally get takers, & it can be built on over time. however one annoyance is a 20rep min to participate in SE chat... :|

@vzn Yes and no. I said that I invested serious effort into similar papers in the past, and hinted that I might have invested "some" effort into some of the "4 sample papers". That question explicitly asked about "proof refutation", with all explicit and implicit consequences. I remembered later that there was indeed once a paper were the result was correct, and that I have indeed mentioned it on my blog and elsewhere.

@ThomasKlimpel ok, what is the (apparently?) correct result? peer review is not an (entirely) objective process... its a sort of intermediate phase between subjectivity and objectivity. somewhat analogous to a phase transition...

@vzn On Zeros of a Polynomial in a Finite Grid

@ThomasKlimpel speaking of RJLipton who has done work in the area! reminds me of this