Terence Tao

And solve that.

So you install nine cheats.

Okay, if you solve ten cheats, then the game is trivial.

But if you solve nine cheats, you solve one problem, that teaches you how to deal with that particular difficulty.

And then you turn that one off and you turn something else on, and then you solve that one.

And after you know how to solve the 10 problems, 10 difficulties separately, then you have to start merging them a few at a time.

As a kid, I watched a lot of these Hong Kong action movies.

It's from a culture.

And one thing is that every time there's a fight scene, you know, so maybe the hero gets swarmed by a hundred bad guy goons or whatever.

But it would always be choreographed so that he'd always be only fighting one person at a time, and then he would defeat that person and move on.

And because of that, he could defeat all of them.

But whereas if they had fought a bit more intelligently and just swarmed the guy at once, it would make for much worse cinema, but they would win.

Are you usually pen and paper?

Are you working with computer and latex?

I'm mostly pen and paper actually.

So in my office I have four giant blackboards and sometimes I just have to write everything I know about the problem on the four blackboards and then sit on my couch and just sort of see the whole thing.

Is it all symbols like notation or is there some drawings?

There's a lot of drawing and a lot of bespoke doodles that only make sense to me.

And the beautiful blackboards you raise, it's a very organic thing.

I'm beginning to use more and more computers, partly because AI makes it much easier to do simple coding things.