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It's definitely U.S. centric.

But, I do think this is reasoning. It requires recall, but anything other than pure logic puzzles do. For example, on a competition math problem or a programming problem, No person or LLM is inventing well-known lemmas and algorithms from first-principles.

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It's not just that it requires recall. It's that it requires no non-trivial thought beyond recall.

I think what you mean is that once you've managed to recall, checking constraints is easy. Remarkably, a few people are much better at this than others. They are able to think fast and execute an explicit mental search over a very small number of plausible candidates. Other people take forever. Seems to be the case for models too.

I think what you said is the same as what your comment said? "Requires no non-trivial thought besides recall" seems remarkably similar to "once you have recalled an item, checking that it fits the constraints is trivial"

Or are you pointing to a nuanced difference between "easy" and "trivial" that I'm not understanding? Or do you think it requires non-trivial thought before the recall step?

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