Yes, you can make problems arbitrarily complex. But the prize problems were chosen not just because the solutions appear likely to be very complex (the problem statements aren't necessarily inherently complex--there is a way to restate the Riemann hypothesis that a junior high school student could easily understand, which I'll give below).

They were chosen because they were important problems that mathematicians really wanted solved, top people had worked on them for a long time and progress stalled a long time ago, and it seemed likely that solving them would require major breakthroughs.

Those kind of problems can be discouraging. Enough people who are probably better than you have spent enough time failing to solve them that realistically most researchers are going to focus all their efforts on something they are likely to make progress on.

A nice prize can get more people to at least work on them as side projects.

Here's that restatement of the Riemann hypothesis I mentioned.

The Riemann hypothesis is that the non-trivial zeros of the function ζ(s) occur on the line 1/2 + yi.

ζ(s) is 1/1^s + 1/2^2 + 1/3^s + ... when s is a complex number whose real part is greater than 1, and defined everywhere else except s = 1 by a process called analytic continuation. The trivial zeros are at s = -2, -4, -6, ... .

For a mathematician, or a non-mathematician who has taken complex analysis and hasn't forgotten much of that, that is not too complex a definition. For anyone else the first reaction is probably "Trivial zeros? How the heck does that thing even have zeros? And if it does how the heck can it have zeros at any negative integers! It is obviously infinity at every negative integer!!!".

Here's a different hypothesis that turns out to be exactly equivalent to the Riemann hypothesis. They are either both true of both false, so resolving one of them resolves the other.

Let H(n) = 1 + 1/2 + ... + 1/n for all positive integers n. These are called the harmonic numbers.

Let S(n) = the sum of the positive integer factors of n for all positive integers n. For example S(4) = 1 + 2 + 4, S(6) = 1 + 2 + 3 + 6, and S(17) = 1 + 17.

Hypothesis: S(n) <= H(n) + exp(H(n)) log(H(n)) with equality only when n = 1.

The proof that this is equivalent to the Riemann hypothesis is here [1].

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/math/0008177

If building a machine that solves these kinds of problems isn't a "major breakthrough," I don't know what is. Is the objection merely that it came from engineers rather than mathematicians? If so, there's plenty of room for contributions from many fields.

The best thing a mathematician can do to advance their art, at this point, is to drop whatever they're doing and work on AI.

Most STEM classes were taught at a fast pace, and later classes assumed you knew the material from your early classes well.

Occasional cheating might work but anything more would almost certainly send you on a path of falling farther and farther behind, requiring more and more cheating, and there were enough things where you would have to work with other students on projects that people would quickly find out you have no idea what you are doing.

Also, your last two paragraphs are completely bogus because you overlooked something important: scale.

AI data centers are being built at a massively higher rate than data centers were being built a few years ago, and an AI data center uses 5-10x more energy than a non-AI data center.

It is quite common for something that is not a big problem to become a major problem when scale massively increases. You can't simply dismiss concerns because they weren't concerns a few years ago. You will have to actually do the analysis to determine if they are legitimate concerns now.

Our 12 tone scale with the major scale note names and notes not in the major scale marked with dots looks like this:

  C.D.EF.G.A.B

  CDE.FGAB....

  C.D.EF.G.A.BC.D.EF.G.A.B
         X.X.XX.X.X.X

Let's do the same 7 tone transposition for the aliens. Their major scale pattern is XXX.XXXX..., so we get

  CDE.FGAB....CDE.FGAB....
         XXX.XXXX...

At first that seems very different from our 7 tone transposition. We only need one sharp and they need 23 flats! But wait...mod 12 we have -23 = 1.

It turns out for all transpositions if you count sharps in your key signature as +1 and flats as -1, the key signature for a transposition by N tones will have 7N sharps or flats mod 12 in both our systems.

In general if you have a T note equal temperament scale with an M note subset major scale, transposing the major scale up N tones gives a key signature with NM mod T sharps/flats.

I'll leave it as an exercise to prove that. Hint: you can think of a transposition as a two step operation: (1) a shift that keeps the same letters and just adds sharps or flats to move the notes, and (2) a renaming that changed the name you use to name the first note of the transposed scale. Think about what each of those operations does to the number of sharps and flats needed.

In the old days solo was a nightmare, but the changes have made it very viable.

Here's a previous comment that goes into details [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31368588

Only about 4% of the US Hispanic population uses it, 75% say it should not be used, and half have never even heard of the word. It doesn't fit Spanish grammar or pronunciation rules which makes it look even out of place.

The 5 millimeter-wave radars and 12 ultrasonic sensors are $100-150. LiDAR is $150-200. The 12 cameras, control unit, and 300 TOPs of computing is $150-200. This computing is comparable to what Tesla puts on their consumer cars, and the sensors suite is much more extensive. (The current robotaxis have about the same computing power as the consumer cars but a lot more RAM).