The Golden Ticket: P, NP, and the Search for the Impossible, written by CCC Council and CRA board member, Lance Fortnow is now available. The inspiration for the book came in 2009 when Fortnow published an article on the P-NP problem for Communications of the ACM. With more than 200,000 downloads, the article is one of the website’s most popular, which signals that this is an issue that people are interested in exploring. The P-NP problem is the most important open problem in computer science because it attempts measure the limits of computation.

The book is written to appeal to readers outside of computer science and shed light on the fact that there are deep computational challenges that computer scientists face. To make it relatable, Fortnow developed the “Golden Ticket” analogy, comparing the P-NP problem to the search for the golden ticket in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, a story many people can relate to. Fortnow avoids mathematical and technical terminology and even the formal definition of the P-NP problem, and instead uses examples to explain concepts.

“My goal was to make the book relatable by telling stories. It is a broad based book that does not require a math or computer science background to understand it.”

Fortnow also credits CRA and CCC for giving him inspiration to write the book.

“One thing I have learned from my experience on the CCC Council is the broad range of computational challenges that computer scientists face. Outside of the CCC, I often only learn about what is going on in my subfield. Being active in CRA and CCC has opened my eyes to more comprehensive issues in computer science.”

Lance Fortnow is professor and chair of the School of Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He founded and coauthors the Computational Complexity blog.