I have this exact same feeling about my ongoing work on the 17x17 problem. In fact I’ve paused my attempts to defeat akrasia since when I work on this the problem akrasia simply isn’t there:
I’ve put in something like 6 months of full-time work on it and the reason I let myself go into it that deep is that it is the only thing I’ve found that pulls me out of the everyday struggle of ‘I’m bored/I should work/I am working/Can’t work any more/Let’s read hacker news/Nice article/I should get back to work...’. For a few precious months I went into an all-work nirvana and I really don’t care what the problem is that motivates me this way. In restrospect, I’ve learned tons of new things, both in math and computing through this project. It has certainly been worth it regardles of the result.
One of the factors that I think has helped me is the mesurability of the results. While working on optimizing the search algorithms I’ve got, I went down from 4 hours per run to about 0,1 seconds in nice idea-sized decrements, in the span of 3 months or so.
I think most of your factors apply. In particular, there is definitely the status gain aspect related to it. A number of people with much more of a math background than myself have tried and failed to solve this problem which has been open now for over a year.
I am not sure I understand the 6th factor in your list.
Finally, success would prove to myself that I am capable of extraordinary feats, not simply locally-worthy accomplishments, which is a prize of great importance to me.
I have this exact same feeling about my ongoing work on the 17x17 problem. In fact I’ve paused my attempts to defeat akrasia since when I work on this the problem akrasia simply isn’t there:
I’ve put in something like 6 months of full-time work on it and the reason I let myself go into it that deep is that it is the only thing I’ve found that pulls me out of the everyday struggle of ‘I’m bored/I should work/I am working/Can’t work any more/Let’s read hacker news/Nice article/I should get back to work...’. For a few precious months I went into an all-work nirvana and I really don’t care what the problem is that motivates me this way. In restrospect, I’ve learned tons of new things, both in math and computing through this project. It has certainly been worth it regardles of the result.
One of the factors that I think has helped me is the mesurability of the results. While working on optimizing the search algorithms I’ve got, I went down from 4 hours per run to about 0,1 seconds in nice idea-sized decrements, in the span of 3 months or so.
I think most of your factors apply. In particular, there is definitely the status gain aspect related to it. A number of people with much more of a math background than myself have tried and failed to solve this problem which has been open now for over a year.
I am not sure I understand the 6th factor in your list.
Finally, success would prove to myself that I am capable of extraordinary feats, not simply locally-worthy accomplishments, which is a prize of great importance to me.