Hi there,
I'm kind of concerned about that since the moment I decided to focus my masters degree in hyper-heuristics. I'm coming from logic/computational complexity background, and recently I re-discovered optimization and all these related stuff. I like the fact that here in optimization we are really near of those theoretical aspects of computing, but from a more pragmatic perspective, and research in this area is almost always easily translated into practical terms.
My point: all those specialized techniques in optimization relies in the fact that at the core, there's an NP problem for that we don't have a poly-time algo to get its solution. And that's one of the biggest motivations of all these interesting theoretical frameworks.
However, P vs NP is an open question. So I've been trying to imagine the scenario where someone proves that P=NP. In that case, what would be the consequences for this field?
I asked my professor about this, and he said (joking) "I might lost my job".
What do you think?