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by dlo 5375 days ago
I don't have enough information to make any conclusions here. But let me add to the discussion that more often than not, it is an order of magnitude (or more!) easier to look at someone else's solution and understand it than it is to arrive at the solution in the first place. I am even willing to believe that, perhaps if the problem were very well-defined, you might be able to solve it in an afternoon. But if you were in his situation, how long would it have taken you to characterize the problem so that you could solve it? Have you had successes doing "complicated stuff" for which there wasn't already something existing to key off of?

In computer science, there is the notion of the NP-complete problem, for which there is no known efficient solution. But if a solution is found, it can be verified very quickly. I think the analogy holds here.
1 comments
sciboy 5375 days ago
It wasn't this. The example was trying to show that a lack of knowledge can be catastrophic in terms of productivity for even the gurus. He spent more than six months on this particular problem and if he had known more math (very typical of people in comp sci unfortunately) he would have been enormously more productive. The problem was formulated before he started any work on this, it really was his lack of (graduate level) math and statistics that caused this particular. I'm not blaming him, it's just he didn't have the tools in his toolbelt to understand the best way to solve the problem, and nor would anyone who didn't have a strong math background.

Math is unreasonably effective. Just like knowledge of basic algorithmic analysis. I don't think that should be controversial.

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cygwin98 5375 days ago
To be fair, what he needed was actually DOMAIN knowledge, in this case, some specific math stuffs. Unfortunately, unlike other domain knowledge such as business workflow, stuffs like Math and Physics are kind of hard-core, can not be quickly picked up by self-learning. He should have had some domain experts (mathematicians) to help him.
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sciboy 5374 days ago
That's my point. Algorithms are the domain knowledge of cs.
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