Should open questions be closed?

Question

So far a decent chunk of the questions I've asked on this site are open in the research sense. E.g., a question like "does problem X have complexity Y" will result in answers giving the best known algorithms with complexities > Y, while also confirming that no one knows whether Y is possible.

How should such questions be handled? Should I mark as accepted an answer that I'm confident describes the best known complexity, or leave them open to indicate that no one yet knows? There are arguments either way: in many cases it's unlikely that the question will be completely closed any time soon, but leaving it open does reflect its actual status.

Answer 1

My feeling is that we should leave these questions open. We have enough active researchers on this SE that people should feel comfortable with questions that turn out not to have a known answer. The Community bot will automatically bump these questions up every so often so that new visitors will get a chance to look at them. It is going to play havoc with your "accept" rate, so you might want to mix in some less challenging questions, or ones that you have discovered the answer to and would like to share.