Comment by saghm
2 years ago
This seems like a question of linguistic semantics, but I'd argue that groups of humans are only good at this at the scale where its not so much a skill of the individual humans but a property of the larger system itself. Millions of humans individually trying to figure out how to exploit some new cards aren't going to be anywhere close to as good as millions of people playing games against each other to try things out, and at that point, it's not obvious to me that humans even scale as well compared to what might be possible with a computer program.
While this is true to some extent, there are absolutely known "hackers" within the community that are particularly good at finding these sorts of interactions. The millions will shake out the rest though for sure.
Yeah, there obviously are some people who are outliers in this regard, but I don't think that's an argument that humans in general are good at this. There are people who can perform complex arithmetic in their head or even eat airplanes one piece at a time[1], but overall I'd still classify humans as "not great" at those tasks.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Lotito