Comment by janalsncm
2 hours ago
To put this into game theory lingo, I think this is because the “branching factor” for any kind of research or exploit is extremely large. So looking backwards it doesn’t seem complicated, but looking forwards there are an enormous number of possible next actions.
Similar to finding a filament for lightbulbs, it might seem obvious to use tungsten, but at the time it wasn’t and Edison searched thousands of materials.
Tesla's critique of Edison was valid though (That he would rather spend a long time empirically testing things, rather than use a bit of theory and knowledge to narrow the search field).