zlacker

Even if lots of real-world problems are intractable in the computational complexity theory sense, that doesn't necessarily mean an upper limit to intelligence or to being able to solve those problems in a practical sense. The complexities are worst-case ones, and in case of optimization problems, they're for finding the absolutely and provably optimal solution.

In lots of real-world problems you don't necessarily run into worst cases, and it often doesn't matter if the solution is the absolute optimal one.

That's not to discredit computational complexity theory at all. It's interesting and I think proofs about the limits of information processing required for solving computational problems do have philosophical value, and the theory might be relevant to the limits of intelligence. But just because some problems are intractable in terms of provably always finding correct or optimal answers doesn't mean we're near the limits of intelligence or problem-solving ability in that fuzzy area of finding practically useful solutions to lots of real-world cases.