Thirded. I just got back from a customer visit. They were trying to do something where the back of the napkin math said it would take a couple dozen CPU years to solve. I recognized a simple (in the math world) transformation we could do and the could run the whole problem in under 10 min.
Coding the transform isn’t trivial, so we’ll get some contract dollars to solve it, but it will still be done faster than the naive approach.
These are pretty sophisticated customers, but they don’t have a deep math background. Without that you wouldn’t find the “obvious” solution.
