Rumplestiltskin Problems

A Rumplestiltskin Problem is when the most immediate obstacle is not knowing the name of the problem you're facing.

For example, it's common to have someone who wants to find the most similar item from a list of items. The first thing they do is write a for loop. If you have a small number of items, this works fine. However, as the list of items or your number of queries grows, it quickly becomes infeasible. Knowing that you are doing "similarity search" exposes you to tools like nearest neighbor indices that will solve your immediate performance problem; if you never come across this term, you'll be forced to reinvent the field yourself.

• how to un-lemmatize / inflect? -> surface realization in nlp:
  https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45590278/how-to-inverse-lemmatization-process-given-a-lemma-and-a-token/45591295#45591295
• similar company names? -> normalizing:
  https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44725930/duplicate-elimination-of-similar-company-names/44754721#44754721

Baby's Bottom in fountain pen nibs.

Now that I knew the name of the problem, I found an abundance of tips and advice on how to fix the issue. Perfect.

https://www.penaddict.com/blog/2014/4/23/smooth-as-a-babys-bottom-or-not