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Calculators gave way to Alan Turing's universal computers, and grew to thousands, then millions and now approaching billions of storage locations and procedure steps per second. In doing so they transcended their paperwork origins and acquired their own murky depths. For instance, without great care, one computer process can spoil another, like a clerk derailed by stray thoughts. On the plus side, superhumanly huge searches, table lookups and the like can sometimes function like human deep processes. In 1956 Allen Newell, Herbert Simon and John Shaw's Logic Theorist's massive searches found proofs like a novice human logician. Herbert Gelernter's 1963 Geometry Theorem Prover used large searches and Cartesian coordinate arithmetic to equal a fair human geometer's visual intuitions. Expert systems' large compilations of inference rules and combinatorial searches match human experience in narrow fields. Deep Blue's giga-scale search, opening and endgame books and carefully-tuned board evaluations defeated the top human chess player in 1997.

Despite such isolated soundings, computers remain shallow bowls. No reasoning program even approaches the sensory and mental depths habitually manifest at the surface of human thought. Doug Lenat's common-sense encoding Cyc, begun in the 1980s and about the most ambitious, would capture broad verbal knowledge yet still lack visual, auditory, tactile or abstract understanding.

Many critics contrast computers' superiority in rote work with their deficits of comprehension to conclude that computers are prodigiously powerful, but universal computation lacks some human mental principle (of physical, situational or supernatural kind, per taste). Some Artificial Intelligence practitioners profess a related view: computer hardware is sufficient, but difficult unsolved conceptual problems keep us from programming true intelligence.