Some tools that can help: * break the hard problem into smaller problems (e.g. "make a car that drives itself" would really benefit from considering smaller co

Some tools that can help: * break the hard problem into smaller problems (e.g. "make a car that drives itself" would really benefit from considering smaller components) * reframe the problem. Sometimes changing the perspective on a problem lets you leverage tools or techniques from related fields. For instance, there isn't much good literature on techniques for understanding obfuscated programs, much of it gets bogged down in low-level details and has a very short shelf life. But there is one field that has a lot of good literature on understanding and transforming programs: compilers. Realizing that was transformative in my own research. * go bottom-up: are there special cases that are easier to solve than the whole? Can you generalize from there? * go top-down: pretend that you could use some off-the-shelf components that would automagically solve parts of the problem. See if you can compose them into something that looks like a solution, then see how to implement them.