For a year, the necklace puzzle sat there, unsolved. A bounty of 0.5 XMR — real money — waiting for someone to crack the code. And then, last week, the news broke: AI solved it.
You’ve probably seen the headlines. They make it sound like a machine outsmarted a challenge that baffled humans for 365 days. But here’s the truth nobody’s telling you: the AI didn’t solve it. A human did. The AI just did the boring part.
Let me explain.
I’ve been following this puzzle since it was first posted. The method—the key insight—was what kept everyone stuck. You could try every combination of Morse code, every language on the list, and still hit a wall. Because the missing piece wasn’t execution. It was which direction to look.
Then, a human had a breakthrough. They found the method. And once that lightbulb went off, the rest was mechanical. Brute force. Pattern matching. The kind of work that makes your eyes glaze over after five minutes.
That’s where the LLM stepped in. It knew Morse. It knew every language. It could iterate twenty times without getting bored, without losing focus, without making a typo. The AI was the perfect executor—but it was never the inventor.
This is the part that scares me. We’re so eager to credit machines with ‘intelligence’ that we forget where the real intelligence comes from. The LLM didn’t have a eureka moment. It didn’t stare at the puzzle for months, chewing on frustration. It just did what it was told, over and over, until the pieces fit.
And yet, the narrative is already shifting. ‘AI solves year-old puzzle.’ ‘Machine surpasses human creativity.’ It’s a dangerous lie—because it makes us think the bottleneck in problem-solving is human imagination. It’s not. The bottleneck is human boredom.
We can dream up the method. We just can’t be bothered to do the 20 rounds of back-and-forth refinement. That’s the deal with AI: it trades our patience for its precision. But the spark? That’s still ours.
So next time you see a headline about AI ‘solving’ something, pause. Ask yourself: Who found the method? Because that person—or that team—is the real story. The AI is just a very fast, very obedient intern.
And that’s the most hopeful thing I can say. Human creativity isn’t obsolete. It’s more valuable than ever—because it’s the one thing AI can’t fake.
FAQ
Q: Didn't the AI actually solve the puzzle?
A: Only if you define 'solving' as executing the final steps. The critical insight—the method—came from a human. The AI had no idea what it was looking for until told.
Q: What's the practical takeaway for teams using AI?
A: Don't ask AI to be creative. Ask it to be tireless. Use humans for the breakthrough, then let AI handle the grind. That's where the real leverage is.
Q: Isn't this just a temporary limitation? Won't AI eventually become creative?
A: Maybe. But right now, the stories that inflate AI's role are dangerous—they make us underestimate our own contribution. The necklace puzzle proves that human insight still drives real progress.