> Intelligence is general and is capable of coping with > novel problems. AI therefore invovles building machines > which have that level of generality. > There is a bias when you think of "programs" to think of programs that a human would actually write or consider useful. But in fact, this is only a tiny (and nontrivial to specify) fraction of the space of "possible programs" - see for example _Foundations of Genetic Programming_, by Langdon and Poli, for some next explorations of general program space. Most possible programs are completely useless and uninteresting to humans (same with proofs, grammars, etc. etc.).

To do AI you have to realize that in the sentences: "Humans have general intelligence and can solve problems in many domains" and "Breadth-first search is a problem-general technique that will always find a solution if one exists" the word "general" does not mean the same thing at all! (cf. the huge literature on inductive bias in human cognition).

For a nice list of program induction problems solvable by search (with a system called ADATE), see http://www-ia.hiof.no/~rolando/Examples/index.html .