this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2025
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Bubble sort is just a basic set of steps for sorting numbers - it doesn’t make choices or adapt. A chess engine, on the other hand, looks at different possible moves, evaluates which one is best, and adjusts based on the opponent’s play. It actively searches through options and makes decisions, while bubble sort just follows the same repetitive process no matter what. That’s a huge difference.
Your argument can be reduced to saying that if the algorithm is comprised of many steps, it is AI, and if not, it isn't.
A chess engine decides nothing. It understands nothing. It's just an algorithm.
That’s not my argument at all. I never said an algorithm is AI just because it has many steps. The key difference isn’t complexity - it’s the nature of what the algorithm does. A Tic-Tac-Toe AI can be extremely simple yet still counts as AI where as something like a game physics engine is extremely complex yet it doesn't simulate intelligence, just physics. Bubble sort follows a fixed sequence with no decision-making. A chess engine, on the other hand, evaluates different moves, predicts outcomes, and optimizes decisions based on a strategy. That’s not just ‘many steps’ - it’s a process of selecting the best action based on the current situation. If you think my argument is about complexity rather than decision-making, you’ve misunderstood my point.
If the decision making in the game is based on a deterministic formula, then it is no different than the decision of selecing which two items in the container to compare next.