The barriers of perception

[This is a guest post by Raghu Meka. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] “This problem has been tried by several famous mathematicians.” “There is a heuristic argument for why these methods cannot work.” “Getting this algorithm would give new circuit lower bounds.” Observations like these can take on a life of their own, almost like a game of telephone. A limitation of a particular approach, or an implication whose difficulty we do not fu...