And before some smart aleck says you can be creative on these types of optimization problems: not in two hours, it’s far too risky vs regurgitating some standard set of tried and true algos.

You're both right and wrong. You're right in the sense that the sort of creativity the task is looking for isn't really possible in two hours. That's something that takes a lot of time and effort over years to be able to do. You're wrong because that's exactly the point. Being able to solve the problem takes experience. Literally. It's having tackled these sorts of problems over and over in the past until you can draw on that understanding and knowledge reasonably quickly. The test is meant to filter out people who can't do it.

I also think it's possible to interpret the README as saying humans can't do better than the optimizations that Claude does when Claude spends two hours of compute time, regardless of how long the human takes. It's not clear though. Maybe Claude didn't write the README.