[arunaugustine]

Speech recognition is an important problem, but if the problem solver does not have an angle of attack, it does not make sense to try and solve it just yet. To quote Richard Hamming from his lecture "You and your research", "It's not the consequence that makes a problem important, it is that you have a reasonable attack."

[taf2]

It's true we should mostly focus on the easy problems... But some of our time especially IMO when we are young should be spent on the hard (unsolvable) problems.