Melvyn Bragg steps down from presenting In Our Time

I'll do the opposite: The P vs NP episode is aboslutely horrid. Probably the first and last time that they had any informatics people on the show. One major issue is that the experts didn't explain what we mean by "hard". Melvyn thought, as normal people do, that 'hard problem' means you've gotta be real clever to solve it, not that it takes a lot of steps to solve (and how the number of steps increases as the problem gets larger). When they had the example of purchasing Christmas gifts as a stand-in for maximum bipartite matching, coupled with Melvyn's misconception, the train wreck was a fact.

That's my memory of the event, that was a frustrating lunch walk.

IOT is great, but there's a distinct lack of computer subjects which has always seemed like a big omission. There are multiple episodes on obscure medieval people, but not a single one on Open Source Software, for example.

In 45 minutes assuming only the education of the (wo)man on the Clapham Omnibus explaining P vs NP is always going to be extremely difficult.

I've never made the mistake of thinking that after a 45 minute episode of in our time on, say, Cyrus the Great, that I'm now in a position to write an essay on the man. I would assume that none M/NS/CS types don't make that mistake after listening to the episode on P vs NP.

I'm not sure what the goal was here, that's not what I'm saying.

That was the first episode i listened to and got hooked after that.