alt Hacker NewsMachines have a much higher capacity for work than human beings. Saying that these proofs did not require equivelant intelligence, but benefitted from sheer volume, does not strike me as unreasonable.
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It feels goalpost-movey to downplay exploring a large search space efficiently in regards to "intelligence". If we dug into a human genius's brain and found it was somehow trying out a million ways to solve a a problem at once, no one would seriously suggest the person isn't actually intelligent.
And our brains must something like that at some physical level. You can't have a "turtles all the way down" of reasoning - the building blocks must be simpler. It must reduce to something like pathfinding and brute force at some point, weighted by factors in the system and maybe some randomness.
Yes my only point here is that you can argue about the semantics of how smart they really are but they are undeniably smart.
Today it cost massive effort but it's possible 10-20yrs from now an AI could solve a problem like this in under an hour with a single thread on a free subscription paid for by serving an ad.
These arguments are so weak because you'll then have to make the same one a few years from now when it does something else impossible. The argument only stands if we assume no progress will occur.