> Krapivin made this breakthrough by being unaware of Yao's conjecture.
I don't think there's any evidence of this. Yao's conjecture is not exactly standard undergraduate material (although it might be—this is a commentary on detail rather than difficulty. But i certainly didn't encounter this conjecture in school). If not knowing this conjecture was the key, millions and millions of students failed to see what Krapivin did. I imagine you'd have to ask him what the key to his insight is.
Hashing is a pretty unintuitive sort of computation. I'm not surprised that there are still surprises.
Great point. Also, Krapivin was working on another paper co-authored by his former professor. He in fact was not working from ignorance. And like you said, most of everyone didn’t know anything about this conjecture, so ignorance certainly wasn’t an ingredient here.
I don't think there's any evidence of this. Yao's conjecture is not exactly standard undergraduate material (although it might be—this is a commentary on detail rather than difficulty. But i certainly didn't encounter this conjecture in school). If not knowing this conjecture was the key, millions and millions of students failed to see what Krapivin did. I imagine you'd have to ask him what the key to his insight is.
Hashing is a pretty unintuitive sort of computation. I'm not surprised that there are still surprises.