Comment by notacoward

Knife nerd comes up with an idea for how to make a steel with a novel combination of hardness / toughness, edge retention, and corrosion resistance. Persuades a real steel company to make a batch, which is tested eighteen ways from Friday by him, the company, and a bunch of knifemakers. Result turns out to be as good as predicted, maybe even a bit better.

Bonus making it even more relevant to HN: most of the "discovery" was done via software, before any physical experiments (which are hard and expensive in this case). The fact that this new approach yielded good results is promising wrt developing steels with different properties.