Yeah, it's interesting the trick they used - they basically used translated books, rather than dictionaries, as their reference... that, and a whole lot of computing power.

If you have an algorithm that works poorly but gets better if you throw more computing power at it, then you can expect progress. If you don't have any algorithm at all that you think will give you a good answer, then what you have is a math problem, not an engineering problem, and progress in math is not something I know how to predict. Some unsolved problems stay unsolved, and some don't.