Comment by senderista

About the only general lesson I can extract so far from these announcements is that apparently we underestimated the extent to which major open problems are amenable to known approaches (possibly from very disparate fields), if they are combined judiciously by a virtually omniscient search engine. Frankly it's a little disappointing to me that these problems didn't require major new creative advances (e.g. the invention of new subfields) for their solution. And arguably that's a loss, if humans, with their inferior search and recall capabilities, would have been forced to resort to more creative solutions.