The number of facts that must be encoded to scale up from a series of small, independent domains to the totality of commonsense knowledge is insurmountably large. Herbert Dreyfus (1972), James Lighthill (1973), and others.
Notes:
- Combinatorial explosion also affects the probelm of searching databases. See Combinatorial Explosion of Search, Box 58.
- This problem has been raised in the context of the Turing test (see Combinatorial Explosion Makes the All Possible-Conversations Machine Impossible, Map 2 Box 103.