It's a _little bit_ brute force, no? I don't disagree with the idea of a human following a similar path, but it ignores that humans have cognitive processes that may lead to pruning the search space in _different_ ways, and may ultimately mean fewer steps or a more directed path to the answer than 100s of python scripts.

We do “a little bit of brute force” in science all the time. That’s what I’ve observed in seven years of science.

Moreover, frontier models have some degree of reasoning. So, I don’t think the gap is all that big.

If you want to call "try multiple solutions to a hypothesis" brute force, then yes, literally all of engineering and science has been brute-forced since the beginning of history.