> It took 17,600 actions, tested many paths that failed, switched channels when they were blocked, and repeatedly returned to earlier leads. Something I've bee

> It took 17,600 actions, tested many paths that failed, switched channels when they were blocked, and repeatedly returned to earlier leads. Something I've been thinking for a few weeks, that I think is becoming clearer, is we're seeing a sort of natural language unification engine [0][1] with a huge dataset. This part even just sounds like it with the backtracking. So that could explain why it does certain things really well, but the overall resulting code is often so bad - it's just linking together successful small well-designed steps without regard to the overall structure. Which people have said similar things before in various ways, but not really tied together. I think the people who say it's just interpolating are seeing this intuitively and can't quite explain it without knowing the right terms. Because from A to Z, it really kind of is, but when Z is even slightly open-ended and there's many possible results or paths, it often ends up with a subpar one. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unification_(computer_science) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unification_(computer_science) [1] My only experience here was some Prolog and building a basic one in Scheme ages ago during college, but the idea has kind of stuck with me.