be significantly different from those taking place outside the horizon of ordinary astrophysical black holes. Hence, from such an experimental standpoint, quantum gravity has little bearing on the question of cosmic censorship. To put it differently, quantum gravity is not expected to restore the event horizon, if the horizon is absent in the classical theory.

Since a theorem proving or disproving the hypothesis has not been found, attention has shifted to studying model examples of gravitational collapse, to find out whether the collapse ends in a black hole or a naked singularity. While specialised examples such as have been studied are nowhere near a general proof, they are really all that we have to go by, as of now. However, there does seem to be an underlying pattern in the results that have been found in these examples, which gives some indication of the general picture. It is interesting that all models studied to date admit both black hole and naked singularity solutions, depending on the choice of initial data. In the next section, we give a summary of what has been learnt from these examples and what they probably tell us about cosmic censorship. In the third section we 