Comment by ActorNightly

I love this comment because it so clearly highlights the difference between intelligence and reasoning.

A lot of people across all fields seem to operate in a mode of information lookup as intelligence. They have the memory of solving particular problems, and when faced with a new problem, they basically do a "nearest search" in their brain to find the most similar problem, and apply the same principles to it.

While that works for a large number of tasks this intelligence is not the same as reasoning.

Reasoning is the ability to discover new information that you haven't seen before (i.e growing a new branch on the knowledge tree instead of interpolating).

Think of it like filling a space on the floor of arbitrary shape with smaller arbitrary shapes, trying to fill as much space as possible.

With interpolation, your smaller shapes are medium size, each with a non rectangular shape. You may have a large library of them, but in the end, there are just certain floor spaces that you won't be able to fill fully.

Reasoning on the flip side is having access to very fine shape, and knowing the procedure of how to stack shapes depending on what shapes are next to it and whether you are on a boundary of the floor space or not. Using these rules, you can fill pretty much any floor space fully.