Comment by pjc50

> much of the groundwork for the “rules-and-heuristics” mode of AI was laid down in the 70s and 80s, long before we had the raw compute power to reliably extract patterns from reality-scale inputs. Those early efforts failed miserably

Yes, and: we concluded that enough of reality doesn't work like that. The formal reasoning space is very powerful, but all the stuff we're really interested in has enough ambiguity and generalisation in that you can't cover it with a "small" set of rules.

Maybe if you had a really large number of rules? And used matrix multiplication to make sure that you covered all the marginal interactions between every possible set of rules? And then had some means of looking back on both output and input to constrain it towards things that were relevant? Wait a minute ...