The CS people screamed that the problem was NP-hard, computationally intractable, etc. But we didn't know what any of that meant, so we got it working.
A reply to the request in The Register for programmers to share their experiences working on computationally intractable tasks.
For the particular problem that comment is discussing (automatic code generation), I suspect that the CS people were describing about a general automatic code generation problem, and the engineers solved a relaxation to that problem which was not in fact intractable.
In general, I don't know how much I like the P-NP distinction. I hear from people who have been in the metaheuristics field for a while that until that became common knowledge, it was basically impossible to get a heuristic published (because you couldn't provably find the optimal solution). Bu...
Another month has passed and here is a new rationality quotes thread. The usual rules are: