I wonder how this relates to tracking down hard-to-find bugs in computer programs.

And that the tremendous high comes from having hit the problem from every angle you can manage, and having bounced; and then having analyzed the problem again, using every idea you can think of, and all the data you can get your hands on - making progress a little at a time - so that when, finally, you crack through the problem, all the dangling pieces and unresolved questions fall into place at once, like solving a dozen locked-room murder mysteries with a single clue.

This sounds very similar to trying to track down a tricky bug to me. I was going to say that bug-hunting is also almost always original discovery, but the everett-branch/tegmark duplicate argument demolishes that idea. One important difference betwen bug-hunting and scientific discovery is probably the expected effort; even well-hidden bugs usually don't take months to track down if the programmer focuses on the task.