> in my experience program committees generally regard difficulty as a negative for a paper. I don't know if we're talking about the same type of difficulty. I

> in my experience program committees generally regard difficulty as a negative for a paper. I don't know if we're talking about the same type of difficulty. I don't think program committees see the difficulty of the problem being solved at the core of the paper as a "negative" necessarily? > The main thing PCs want is for papers which make progress on important problems. Now, you can do this either by (1) attacking existing open problems, or (2) by finding new important problems. My earlier note aside, I think this is an extremely important point. It seems to support the idea that "impact" is hard to gauge but much easier when the community has already arrived at some form of consensus on the importance of a problem.