Hah, such a great way to put it.

This is relevant to HN because I'm probably paraphrasing this incorrectly but pg has said the following about why it's hard to launch a startup: the vast majority of ideas that sound stupid are, in fact, stupid. The ones that sound like great ideas have most likely already been done. Thus, the startups that have huge growth potential tend to be the ones that sound stupid given the conventional wisdom (so unlikely to have been tried yet) but are, contrary to the norm, actually great ideas in disguise. These ideas are basically by definition very rare.

I advise anyone with a startup idea to just make a prototype you would like, then see if its reinventing the wheel. Repeat where necessary

Better yet, let customers decide if it’s reinventing the wheel. Many times, founders prematurely decide it’s duplicative, or delude themselves into thinking it’s not.

We all guess at the value customers receive, but only they can say for sure.

Totally agree, manage risk where necessary such that you don't rely on a project getting traction. If it does, great.

and compare it to all the times breakthrough is made by iteration

Also, making a good game is not a scientific breakthrough. There were great deck builders before.

Also there isn’t anything that hasn’t been done before either in Balatro, it’s just a nice combination of deck builder tricks applied to poker. And the presentation is also well done which has nothing to do with the mechanics.

I respectfully but totally disagree.

Balatro took the basic game mechanics of a very familiar game and said “what if they were dynamic”. The world’s a big place and I’m willing to believe it’s been done before… but I can’t think of one.

It’s the combination of familiar scoring mechanics with fun meta game modifiers that made Balatro so successful. What happens to poker if two of a kind is suddenly the most important hand? Or if not playing face cards leads to incrementally better scores every hand?

Again, I can’t claim it’s never been done, but saying it’s just another deck builder is missing the point.

You just re-explained deck builders. Scoring modifiers can be part of their mechanics.

Real time chess is a similar example of making a known game more dynamic and completely changing which positions are seen as strong or weak.

Good analogy. Balatro goes a lot further by making the rules dynamic during the game, but at least categorically similar.

This is elegantly stated.

That misses the point that there may be breakthroughs that are much harder or near impossible to make if you're familiar with the state-of-the-art.

What's the proportion to breakthroughs that are easier with familiarity? How many accidental discoverers do we need to match the output of a Terrance Tao or an Erdős?

That seems like the wrong question to ask. After all, there's no shortage of people who are unfamiliar with Yao's conjecture.

Or alternatively, even the most well-read person is not au fait with the state of the art in almost all subjects, so they have a chance to make an accidental discovery there.

But this kid wasn't an outsider: he was already studying computer science at perhaps the most rigorous and prestigious institution in the world, and it's not a coincidence that he made this discovery rather than an equally talented twenty-year-old who works in a diamond mine in Botswana. There's no risk that we'll reduce the number of accidental discoveries by educating people too much.

> That misses the point that there may be breakthroughs that are much harder or near impossible to make if you're familiar with the state-of-the-art.

If that's the point, you should maybe try and find even a single example that supports it. As the article points out, Krapivin may not have been familiar with Yao's conjecture in particular, but he was familiar with contemporary research in his field and actively following it to develop his own ideas (to say nothing of his collaborators). Balatro's developer may not have been aware of a particular niche genre of indie game[1], but they were clearly familiar with both modern trends/tastes in visual and sound design, and in the cutting edge of how contemporary video games are designed to be extremely addictive and stimulating. To me, these examples both seem more like the fairly typical sorts of blind spots that experts and skilled practitioners tend to have in areas outside of their immediate focus or specialization.

Clearly, both examples rely to some extent on a fresh perspective allowing for a novel approach to the given problem, but such stories are pretty common in the history of both math research and game development, neither (IMO) really warrants a claim as patently ridiculous as "the best way to approach a problem is by either not being aware of or disregarding most of the similar efforts that came before."

[1] And as good of a video game as Balatro is, there are plenty of "roguelite deckbuilder" games with roughly the same mechanical basis; what makes it so compelling is the quality of its presentation.

Yeah. Classic base rate neglect.