Elegance and intelligence are anticorrelated

Elegance and intelligence can have a surprisingly negative correlation. Intelligent people sometimes produce inelegant solutions because they’re capable of rapidly brute-forcing problems. If I had to remember a hundred names, I would spend time coming up with clever mnemonics. John von Neumann would probably just remember them. There’s a famous von Neumann story where he was asked how far a fly must travel if it kept flying between two cyclists who were approaching each other at some fixed speed. The trick to the puzzle was to notice that the cyclists would take an hour to meet, so the fly must be travelling for an hour: given the fly’s speed, it’s then easy to calculate the total distance. When von Neumann solved the puzzle instantly, the questioner assumed he’d heard the trick before, but in fact he had just summed the infinite series. If you can do that instantly in your head, why bother with the clever trick? For software engineers, the most important kind of raw intelligence is…