I guess I should just ignore KH for the duration of this thread, we're having communication problems. Or maybe he's just being abusive for fun. Anyway, substantively different? Do you mean in terms of achieving the desired result? Well, you could brute-force almost anything given any amount of trial and error, and enough time or sufficiently fast trials. But I would not characterize that as intelligence. If you present a computer with a given task, and it has a genetic algorithm, it will eventually come up with a very good solution for that task, normally. But for example, what happens if you give it the instruction, "devise a procedure for constructing a Pembrose triangle?" I imagine it will work forever trying method after method, and it will at no point conclude, "you can't build a Pembrose triangle, it's impossible by nature." It'll keep running on and on until you pull the plug or it breaks down, unless you include a line telling it to give up after X million failed attempts. Or you program it with data: "NOTE: Pembrose triangles are impossible, as are various other head-hurting structures devised by rat bastard mathematicians." Which isn't intelligence, it's just the programmer intervening to compensate. Whereas a human being of reasonable intellect will look at the figure and realize after a few seconds of inspection that the structure violates the laws of physics. The human mind can look at the problem itself, searching for "creative" answers; a computer's got no choice but to follow instructions, and those instructions (as well as the computer's algorithm) are limited by the intelligence of the designer and the amount of care taken. That's the real hitch: a computer only does what you tell it to do. You don't need to tell a human mind to learn. It takes initiative, learns of its own volition. In practice, I suppose it doesn't much matter, since computers are supposed to be our drudges anyway. And under normal circumstances they can achieve very good results. All I'm saying is that 'taint intelligence.