[akomtu]

TL;DR (from skimming thru the paper) he figured that a song's spectrogram looks like a starry sky, so matching a song is like finding a constellation on the sky. How do you do it efficiently? By searching for simple features of your constellation, such as pairs or triples of bright stars - those can be pre-hashed to find matches instantaneously. Once a possible match is found, you compare the rest of the constellation. Nothing breathtaking, in other words. However, among all the men who talked, he was the one who both talked and did, and that's his achievement.

[sdwr]

Brilliant stuff is easy to understand, a lot harder to come up with. I could do that! (With a little help from wikipedia, audio processing libraries, the answer sheet, and the knowledge that it's possible in the first place)

To me, this highlights how hashing is the closest thing programmers have to magic.