We’re not. We’re not researchers at all. We’re just two people who became obsessed with a problem and put their meager knowledge to use, beating rocks against rocks in different configurations until something resembling a spearhead came out. Our experience with Rust was, up to this point, six blog posts done on introductory Advent of Code problems over the course of six months. We didn’t know much at the start, but we learned. First, we Googled and clicked on the first result. Then we scoured Stack Overflow and papers, and when that failed, we reached out to specialist Discord servers and emailed experts. When existing Rust crates didn’t do what we needed, we made our own Rust crates. We now know a lot of very obscure information about HATETRIS, but you could still fill volumes with things about HATETRIS that we don’t know. Many of the breakthroughs we had were due to ignorance. We pulled out the concept of waveforms because we were terrified that the next thing we’d have to do to push things forward was do complex matrix operations on a GPU. Inventing a new way of thinking about the problem seemed easier.
You, too, can do something like this. Find a problem. Become obsessed with it. Learn everything you can about it. Fall down dead ends. Give up, and then keep thinking about the problem at night. Have Eureka moments that lead you down other dead ends. Find a friend willing to get as obsessed as you are. Underestimate the time commitment, and then refuse to back down. Embrace the sunk cost fallacy. As long as you keep thinking about the problem, even if its in short bursts every few years, you’re still making progress. And if you never finish? If all you find are side-paths and obstacles, and it turns out the entire mission was doomed from the outset? That’s okay too. Projects like this nourish us, because there’s a part of the human mind that wants nothing more than to climb the mountain, rappel into the cave, explore the unknown and grapple with it.
