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this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2026
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Yet another slippery fish to try to wrestle with bare hands. What constitutes complexity? Some relatively simple looking questions turn out to be highly complex: Are there any whole-number solutions to (a^n + b^n = c^n) if (n) is greater than 2?
Then, any number of complex looking questions turn out to be quite simple with a little insight: such as any large product which has a factor that reduces to 0.
What's simple for some people is hard for others, and I would posit that is greatly amplified when you stop comparing humans to humans and start comparing humans to animals or machines...
We put unfeeling psychopaths in charge of our largest corporations, to maximize profits - a machine might be less scary in the long run.
Well, that’s not really a philosophical question. Simple questions are ones that only deal with one question at a time and have single answers.
Complex question involve multiple implicit questions and require inference to answer and there are multiple possible correct answers.
“Are there any whole-number solutions to (a^n + b^n =c^n) where n>2” isn’t complex. That’s actually extremely easy to answer. You could just keep brute forcing through every whole number in known existence if you had the compute power. Like trying to find the next digit of pi. But that’s not Fermat’s last theorem. The actual problem is “there are no whole-number solutions to (a^n + b^n =c^n) where n>2, prove it“ which is much more complex because it requires answering multiple questions along the way. The implicit questions that arise are simple “why” questions that have to be answered.
The answer to your question is “no”. But then the follow is “well why”. Wrapping it all up in a nice equation that explains all the “well why” questions before they’re even asked is the complex part.
AI is already getting to that point. LLMs are not synonymous with AI. They’re a type of AI but there are far more models out there than just LLMs. They’re just a subset of generative AI.
“Easy” and “hard” are NOT the same thing as “simple” and “complex”.