"Malicious" is an overstatement, but "exploit" is completely fair in my view. Theory with no possible practical relevance is useless, and I think a computational complexity result requiring arbitrary-precision arithmetic that is impossible to implement using any physical system qualifies.

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nullc 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Plenty of mathematics was practically useless for long periods of time, waiting for us to invent computers, cryptography, error correcting codes, etc.

It's extremely hard to know what mathematics may be useful in the future or not.

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modeless 3 hours ago | parent [-]

It's hard to know for certain, but that doesn't mean we should throw up our hands and say anything goes. We can still say that some things are more likely to be useful than others.

	▲	winwang 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The idea that FFT's decomposition is non-optimal is surprising. What the new bound means is we basically were looking at the problem and its structure incorrectly, and therefore implicates other problems for which we have used recursion to get to our currently-best bounds. Almost no interesting math problems are just sitting there alone in their little corner. Getting a hint like that is a big deal.
	▲	satvikpendem an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		How can we say that without knowing the future?