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Wow that brings back the memories. I remember when it first came out it seemed like such a small step from having a system that could converse about a simplified universe to one that could converse about a much closer to "real" universe. And here we are with computers that are literally over a million times more powerful and nope, still can't ask Alexa or Google home where you left the car keys.

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So what was the problem? Why couldn't we add more and more more things to build it slowly into a more general AI?

For the same reason we still need classical physics and chemistry and biology and psychology and sociology even though in principle it should be possible to model everything ab initio with just quantum mechanics. In practice we can just barely do that with single molecules before the complexity grows insurmountable.

If I recall... the complexity of the program/system scaled exponentially with the complexity of the universe it had to support. something like that

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