I wouldn't count that as close for numerous reasons. If this were an interview question, I would expect discussion of NP-complete vs NP-hard at the very least.

I wouldn't count that as close for numerous reasons. If this were an interview question, I would expect discussion of NP-complete vs NP-hard at the very least. > it's impossible to predict the best solution without brute forcing all possible combinations of action That's not true; all possible combinations are not required to be checked; frequently a greedy algorithm can eliminate the majority of possibilities without actually checking them. "Impossible" is also a very strong word. Furthermore, there are plenty of problems where we currently can't solve them without bruteforce ("impossible" to do so), but we don't know if they're NP-complete/even in the NP-class. However, the really important detail you're missing which makes your answer completely wrong is the verification of the proof. If a problem is of NP Complexity, than it must be computationally easy to determine that an answer is correct in polynomial time. Your answer simply stated that a solution could be found by brute-forcing, not that the answer is easy to verify once found, and not that said brute-forcing must not be in non-polynomial time. By missing those two details, your answer is so far off the mark I'd recommend passing in an interview based on that alone.