Solving Unsolvable Problems
It’s surprising how often people can solve unsolvable problems. The trouble is finding the right knowledge to apply to the problem. In Britain prior to the 16th century coal couldn’t be used to make iron, it didn’t burn hot enough and had too much sulphur to make good quality iron [1]. A number of patents were granted in the 16th century for turning coal into coke which solves both these issues. This was an instrumental component to starting the industrial revolution. The crazy thing is, people on the other side of the world in China had figured out how to make coke in the 4th-9th century [2].
Today we have similar issues with what is possible using analysis and computers. As an example, a colleague of mine used optimisation as part of a simulation to make a fake schedule in lieu of specific rules. The client was amazed, they had been making their schedules by hand which is why they couldn’t provide a good description of their process. In the end, adding optimisation to this process provided more value than the original simulation project! By adding optimisation they could make more reliable and efficient schedules without adding any workload.
As another example, what is considered a “big” amount of data is different for different people. True “big data” is measured in peta-bytes or more. I worked with one company where this was their every-day process, yet I would need to do some research before I could tackle this volume of data myself. My usual techniques stop being effective around the 100,000 million row mark (a few TB) and I just don’t have the knowledge on hand to be effective past that scale. One of my clients commented that their data was too large to process, they had over 1 million rows and it no longer fit in an excel spreadsheet. What seems impossible to some, is every day for others.
In these situations, the person who is blocked is not foolish or unintelligent, they just haven’t encountered the required techniques before and don’t know the possibilities. If you’ve got a thorny problem that you’re not sure you can solve, let’s have a chat (Hello@NorthCardinal.com.au). Perhaps it will be easier than you think!
[1] https://acoup.blog/2020/09/25/collections-iron-how-did-they-make-it-part-ii-trees-for-blooms/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coke_(fuel)#History