Cute, but not quite. To add to 3pt14159's and jessriedel's comments above: - Fundamentally, automating programming is equivalent to finding a satisfying assign

Cute, but not quite. To add to 3pt14159's and jessriedel's comments above: - Fundamentally, automating programming is equivalent to finding a satisfying assignment / refining a specification; so it is a perfectly well-formed question. (Further, we still don't even formally know if it's hard at all; but I digress.) - It seems to me the "short-circuit" argument kinda defeats itself... by the very fact the explanation itself is a great example of short English sentences successfully conveying a huge cardinality of "minor" variations! - The "minor variation" device itself seems to me intrinsically flawed. Most (all?) depictions in nature are overwhelmingly sparse --in the SP sense--, and so most plausible instances of minor variations like "changing one pixel" could arguably be produced in a quasi prefix-free / constant overhead manner from the same underlying English language description. Thus the corresponding "eps-close" spheres of minor variations could well form huge equivalence classes --like one would expect from common sense.