Lessons Learned from Shenzhen I/O
> Only once you know for a fact that a better solution is possible can you actually think of that solutionThis section reminded me of something a friend posited about space travel.There are some inventions that just being exposed to the idea of them is enough to invent them. For instance, it seems that cultures that encounter others that have written language fairly quickly invent their own, even without knowledge of how the others work. The Cherokee syllabary was invented by an illiterate silversmith in the 1820s after he saw other people communicating via paper and knew that they represented a way to transmit information (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequoyah#Sequoyah_and_Cherokee...). The writing system that he invented was a syllabary, not an alphabet like the people he'd been observing or a logographic system like some other Native American languages. Having a writing system is a contagious idea all its own and knowing that they exist is sufficient to invent one.It may be that efficient space travel is one of these inventions: just seeing someone else do it may be enough to invent it ourselves. I don't mean in the sense that we may observe details that give us hints as to how it works (though that's probably also true), I mean in the way that the article says "If nobody had gotten to the score of 180 before me, I couldn’t have thought of any faster way of solving this puzzle. Without that piece of information, the brain just comes up with reasons why the score is already optimal". Simply observing working space travel may be enough for us to invent it ourselves. We may even invent a system entirely unlike the one we observed.