The following things come to mind when you look into research in this area, especially the search for BB(5) which was hard but doable:
- it is largely recreational mathematics, i.e. done by non-professionals, a bit like the aperiodic tiling. Humbly, they tend to call their results lemmas
- complex structure emerges from simple rules, leading to a complex classification with a few edge cases, much like the classification of finite simple groups
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