When I ask questions of the form "what is the complexity of problem BLAH", then there is an ambiguity (to me) about whether an accepted answer should simply give the best known bounds according to current literature, or whether I shouldn't accept an answer until the exact complexity has been nailed (which may require an original proof).
In particular I am not sure what to do about answers that say that the problem is open. In a sense, these answers solve my problem, as they tell me that the question is already known to be tricky and is not so likely to be answered in the near future. On the other hand, they do not give the answer that I am interested in, and could be ultimately replaced by a more definitive answer. Should such answers be accepted?
Here are some examples:
In this question, I asked about the complexity of a problem, and an author of the most relevant paper on the topic answered that he did not know. This answer is of course very useful, but I do not know whether I should accept it. (Update: meanwhile, a new answer has been posted, so the description here no longer makes sense)
In that question, I accepted an answer saying that the problem was still open. I guess this is reasonable as my question was asking "is the problem still open".
(Sorry if this isn't the right kind of questions for meta.CS.SE. I'm not familiar with the meta sites.)
