The Status of the P Versus NP Problem

The current issue of CACM (Communications of the ACM) has a very nice summary of the long-standing question of whether nondeterministic polynomial-time problems (NP) can also be solved in polynomial-time (P). In particular, it discusses the implications of this question on computing and other scientific disciplines in some detail: http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2009/9/38904-the-status-of-the-p-versus-np-problem/