I spent 3 months implementing a paper once. Finally, I got to the point where I understood the paper probably better than the author. It was an extremely compli

I spent 3 months implementing a paper once. Finally, I got to the point where I understood the paper probably better than the author. It was an extremely complicated paper (homomorphic encryption). At this point, I realized that it doesn't work. There was nothing about it that would ever work, and it wasn't for lack of understanding. I emailed the author asking to clarify some specific things in the paper, they never responded. In theory, the paper could work, but it would be incredibly weak (the key turned out to be either 1 or 0 -- a single bit).