"Algorithms can be extremely hard to discover" Can be, most aren't. Most are specializations of a well known thing, applied to a new area. Page rank is (maybe)

"Algorithms can be extremely hard to discover" Can be, most aren't. Most are specializations of a well known thing, applied to a new area. Page rank is (maybe) a good example of this. Not quite old enough to transfer myself back to the time, but diffusion on graphs and power methods have been around for a while.