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"Creative problem solver" is only a valuable label if you are well-read and understand existing solutions to problems. Which is not creative. In fact, most prob
by Retra 11y ago
"Creative problem solver" is only a valuable label if you are well-read and understand existing solutions to problems. Which is not creative. In fact, most problems can be solved perfectly adequately by applying tried-and-true boring, uncreative methods.
- CuriouslyC 11y agoThat's not really true. The creativity comes in seeing the parallels between disparate areas, and being able to use things in unintended ways to good effect. As a random example, I was able to take a road pollution model that was meticulously optimized, written in Fortran, and approximate its results in Javascript, with almost an order of magnitude performance INCREASE, to the point that pollution models can be computed in near realtime in the browser (road network density permitting). I did this by using optimization to approximate the model's pollution distribution about road segments using Bezier surfaces, which are fast to compute and have the nice property of being completely contained within the convex hull of their control points. That containment property let me leverage an R*-Tree to quickly determine which sources could contribute an appreciable amount of pollution to a given pixel, and only compute those. None of the algorithms or data structures I used were original, but the circumstances where I applied them are somewhat novel and the results are fantastic.