You're over-indexing on the (erroneous) idea that my example meant that the program would be a single if statement. > A lot of solutions require way more code

You're over-indexing on the (erroneous) idea that my example meant that the program would be a single if statement. > A lot of solutions require way more code to implement than to describe the necessary properties of. That's true to an extent, the additional code often define the emergent and undiscovered properties of a system.