[notsuoh]

I don't get the impression that several hundred/thousand individuals had anything to do with this being solved by this person, except perhaps by virtue of not solving it and thereby leaving it to be an open problem with the opportunity to be solved.

After reading the article, this didn't come across as a "standing on the shoulders of giants" situation, but rather that this person by chance had the problem, found it interesting enough to work on, and happened to try the right path to solve it.

[spoonjim]

Right, but if the FBI goes and hires a code breaker, they don’t get one of the three who solved it. They get one of the thousands with the credentials to have a reasonable chance of success. So if the FBI wants to put the three who solved it on the job, they have to deploy the thousand who didn’t because they don’t know the difference between them until it’s solved.

[labster]

How about the FBI builds a time machine, goes to the future to find out who solved it, then hires those people? I call it self-fulfilling cryptography.

[dx034]

Still survivorship bias. We tend to assume that because they cracked it, anyone like them could've done that in the past. In reality, maybe even the author had a chance of 0.001% to crack it and they just got lucky in choosing the right paths and having the right intuitions.

It's the same in many parts of research. You obviously would've had no chance without their expertise but just because a researcher discovers something new does not mean there's no luck involved.

[macksd]

I think the point of the person to whom you're replying is that it being solved doesn't mean it was as easy as it now looks. When we see it done and we see the methods are not all that novel, we are biased to think that. But the fact that it was not more complete until then and was a subject of fascination for many actually implies the opposite. We're looking at an incredibly rare event and asking why a few specific investigators couldn't have achieved that decades ago.

The "decades ago" caveat is especially key, because they used a computer system with raw performance well within an order of magnitude of today's Top500 supercomputers. I like to point out government incompetence too, but spending that kind of resources banging away at a message from a killer we don't believe has been active for several decades isn't exactly a prudent move.

[darepublic]

Sure but each person seriously attempting it still increased the probability of a solution arising

[TrispusAttucks]

Sure but still mutually exclusive from this specific attempt.