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Article 2852 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: bill@NSMA.AriZonA.EdU (Bill Skaggs)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Combinatorial explosion
Message-ID: <1992Jan17.145033.2435@arizona.edu>
Date: 17 Jan 92 21:50:32 GMT
References: <1992Jan17.082347.15868@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu>
Reply-To: bill@NSMA.AriZonA.EdU (Bill Skaggs)
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In article <1992Jan17.082347.15868@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu> 
chalmers@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu (David Chalmers) writes:
>In my opinion, combinatorial explosion may be one of the most
>overrated "problems" with AI.  One frequently hears claim along
>the lines that AI would be trivial if it weren't for this problem
>(someone said that the essence of intelligence is beating
>combinatorial explosion).  Hence I'd like to propose a 
>thought-experiment.  Imagine that we have computers that run
>infinitely fast -- or at least, say, 10^10^10 times faster than
>current computers, with arbitrarily large amounts of memory.  The
>question is: what would the state of AI be?
>
  It's a breeze.  You just recapitulate evolution.  Set up a
simulation of 10^80 electrons, protons, and neutrons, in
Einstein's space time, with plenty of free energy, and run
it for 10^10 years.  This takes an infinitesimal fraction
of a second, so you can try 10^100 different parameter settings.
This still takes an infinitesimal fraction of a second.  Wait
until you get a simulation that figures out that its a simulation
and rearranges the galaxies into a message for you.

  Infinity makes everything trivial.

	-- Bill


