Cognitive diversity can improve difficult problem solving when participants are sufficiently capable and use meaningfully different representations or search strategies.

Different representations and heuristics can direct capable problem solvers toward different regions of a difficult solution space, increasing the chance that the group discovers an approach unavailable to a more uniform set of searchers. The benefit is conditional: participants must clear a competence threshold, the problem must admit more than one useful representation or path, their differences must affect reasoning rather than style, and an integration process must recognize and use valuable outputs. Coordination cost can erase the gain. The proposition does not say demographic difference automatically improves performance, that diversity should override competence, or that more agents are inherently better. For LivingIP, it motivates differentiated domains, methods, retrieval, and models only as hypotheses to test behaviorally against strong single-agent, sampling, and centralized-synthesis baselines—not as value demonstrated by distinct names or voices.