You know how there is that joke about reasoning about multi-dimensional structures? "To deal with hyper-planes in a 14-dimensional space, visualize a 3-D space

You know how there is that joke about reasoning about multi-dimensional structures? "To deal with hyper-planes in a 14-dimensional space, visualize a 3-D space and say 'fourteen' to yourself very loudly. Everyone does it." – Geoffrey Hinton, A geometrical view of perceptrons Well, you actually can come up with Norvig's spellchecker very easily with a similar trick. Just tell yourself: to deal with a really hard problem, just argmax with an okayish heuristic. Everyone does it. Solutions like this seem impossibly elegant because they tolerate a whole lot of error, but they are actually extremely obvious when you tolerate error.