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Reader question: Please explain this sentence: “They made researchers look for out-of-the-box solutions for problems that, till then, appeared unsolvable.” Out-of-the-box solutions? My comments: To paraphrase: The researchers were creative enough to try brand new measures which enabled them to solve age-old problems. How did the researchers come up with these so called out-of-the-box solutions? They thought outside the box, that’s how, and went for something completely new. The box, you see, is any container to put things in. It’s an enclosure – of limited space and contents. There’s only so much you can do within those limits, of course. Outside the box? That’s open space, with unlimited potential for imagination and creativity. The box metaphorically stands for a closed mind, or conventional ideas and ways of doing things. In other words, the box contains the same old, same old. To think outside the box is, on the other hand, not to be restrained by the old traditional ways of doing things but be able to seek brand new measures in order to solve old problems. A Chinese example of this kind outside-the-box or lateral or divergent thinking is the legend of Zhuge Liang (181-234), one of the smartest military strategists of the Three Kingdoms period. He once was ordered to produce 100,000 pieces of arrows in a matter of days. With production capabilities being the way they were, it just was impossible to hammer out such a number of arrows in such a limited time. No doubt such an order, a tall order you may say, would find most people at their wit’s end. All they could do was gather all the hammer smiths they could gather and watch them fail to meet the target number. | 
