Recently I heard of a recent field in mathematics called tropical geometry. Having read the wiki page on it it seems like it is combinatorial algebraic geometry.
My question is what are the benefits of applying tropical geometry to problems in algebraic geometry? Are there examples of theorems in algebraic geometry where a proof was made much simpler using tropical geometry? Or are there any conjectures in algebraic geometry that was proved using tropical geometry?
Also does anyone know the motivation behind why it was developed?