And you have to equate winning the prize with intelligence, and we have to assume that everybody has an equal chance of winning - the nominators and judges must be unbiased and equally aware of all possible laureates. In other words, I doubt it can be used as a reliable metric.
I’m sure this won’t go far, but I guess we may as well get the ball rolling.
Can you give some kind of a cite that it can’t be an illusion? You’re asserting it’s impossible, but I don’t know why it is.
Moving beyond that issue, since you swear you don’t want to talk about it, I’d say that the first thing we have to do is define intelligence. There are many different kinds of smarts; intelligence is not synonymous with ‘achievement’ or ‘the capacity to lead,’ for example.