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It will be nice to see the breakthroughs resulting from what people _believed_ Q* to have been.

I love this take. Reminds me of how the Mechanical Turk apparently indirectly inspired someone to build a weaving machine b/c "how hard could it be if machines can play chess" -- https://x.com/gordonbrander/status/1385245747071787008?s=20

This is one of my favourite "errors" of human thinking: mistaking something false for reality, and then making it real based on the confidence gained from that initial mistake.

An example I heard was that one of the programmers working on the original Unreal engine saw a demo of John Carmack's constructive solid geometry (CSG) editor. He incorrectly surmised that this was a real-time editor, so he hurriedly made one for the Unreal game engine to "keep up" with Quake. In reality, the Quake editor wasn't nearly as responsive as he assumed, and in fact he had to significantly advance the state of the art to "keep up"!

I recall that this is the story behind overlapping windows on the old Macintosh computers, although a concrete source seems difficult to find[0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2998463

certainly more things to throw at the wall! Excited to see the "accidental" progress

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