[olewhalehunter]

That quote would make sense if the quoted had say, isolated the medicinal properties of penicillin, but Vapnik invented Support Vector Machines which have solved generalized cases of classification but directly solved 0 problems (if you say something like running an OCR algo on documents whose purpose remain unamed that were: translated from human speech or thought, printed on paper, then scanned; is solving a problem directly I question your ability to speak of general and direct problem solving any further).

[gridspy]

Perhaps Vapnik was speaking from experience when he said that "generalized problems suck."

[tnecniv]

Generality is relative.