I'm sure Norvig is exceptional in many ways, quite possibly 10x, but the tricky thing about examples is that some things that look hard from the outside aren't. They're just about familiarity.
I saw that you mentioned a spell-checker, and thought "I'd use levenshtein distance. That wouldn't be hard to implement on a flight. I wonder what he did that's better." Turns out, he used levenshtein distance, and tuned the results with frequency estimates. I don't know if I'd have thought of that, but it's also not a mysterious technique--I'm confident a lot of people who work more in related areas than I do would think of it.
“Four thousand dollars!” gasped the CEO. “All you did was walk over and push a little button on the side of that machine. Can you give us a breakdown?”
The consultant jotted on a piece of paper and handed it to the CEO.
“Pushing button: $1
Knowing which button to push: $3999″
I saw that you mentioned a spell-checker, and thought "I'd use levenshtein distance. That wouldn't be hard to implement on a flight. I wonder what he did that's better." Turns out, he used levenshtein distance, and tuned the results with frequency estimates. I don't know if I'd have thought of that, but it's also not a mysterious technique--I'm confident a lot of people who work more in related areas than I do would think of it.