There is a strangely titled book written by one of the early Microsoft employee called "Barbarians Led by Bill Gates" which describes authors interactions with Myrvold. It's a very enlightening and entertaining book to learn more about how Myrvold works.
One of the incidence in this book is as follows: Myrvold one day thinks of an idea that shadings in the picture can be compressed using electromagnetic equations. Basically look at the shading as charge field, solve EM equations to find what set of charge at which positions would produce that field. Then the position of charges becomes the description of the field. Trained eyes would immediately see issues here and discard this idea as naive version of optimization problem. However Myrvold probably has a patent on it.
One of the incidence in this book is as follows: Myrvold one day thinks of an idea that shadings in the picture can be compressed using electromagnetic equations. Basically look at the shading as charge field, solve EM equations to find what set of charge at which positions would produce that field. Then the position of charges becomes the description of the field. Trained eyes would immediately see issues here and discard this idea as naive version of optimization problem. However Myrvold probably has a patent on it.