Reminds me of the early days of computer science, the 60s and 70s.
I once casually flipped through the CS journal papers archived in my university library, and those two decades were really fascinating.
1) All of the papers were simple, clear, and easy to follow. No greek symbols, no fancy maths, just straighforward pseudocode.
2) The algorithms being presented were new at the time, but were rather trivial, and could have been invented by any of us. They just hadn't been invented, formalised, and written down yet. It was basically a race starting from zero, and nobody had taken very many steps yet.
3) Every new algorithm was such a huge leap that it unlocked many new avenues of advancement for other algorithms. There was a period where it was a race of publishing these follow-up developments nearly as fast as people could type.
For a modern example of this, look at the pace of progress of generative AI such as LLMs and Diffusion Models. The first papers were almost trivial, but that "one clever trick" unlocked many more ideas and the rate of publication over the last twelve months has been insane. A lot of low-hanging fruit, a lot of road-blocks suddenly removed, etc...
I once casually flipped through the CS journal papers archived in my university library, and those two decades were really fascinating.
1) All of the papers were simple, clear, and easy to follow. No greek symbols, no fancy maths, just straighforward pseudocode.
2) The algorithms being presented were new at the time, but were rather trivial, and could have been invented by any of us. They just hadn't been invented, formalised, and written down yet. It was basically a race starting from zero, and nobody had taken very many steps yet.
3) Every new algorithm was such a huge leap that it unlocked many new avenues of advancement for other algorithms. There was a period where it was a race of publishing these follow-up developments nearly as fast as people could type.
For a modern example of this, look at the pace of progress of generative AI such as LLMs and Diffusion Models. The first papers were almost trivial, but that "one clever trick" unlocked many more ideas and the rate of publication over the last twelve months has been insane. A lot of low-hanging fruit, a lot of road-blocks suddenly removed, etc...