Comment by tovej

I'm not talking about wacky. My barrier for novel is 1) new capabilities 2) useful, and 3) end-to-end tested.

For example, what I refered to that I've written is a dynamic storage solution for n-dimensional grids, that can grow arbitrarily in any direction, and is locally dense (organized into spatially indexed blocks of contiguous data).

I had never considered this problem before, and I certainly had never seen a solution before (even though there may well be one).

I worked it out on paper, considering how integer lattices can be partitioned and indexed, and then I transformed that into a design which I then implemented. Working purely from the design, not considering existing solutions.