“is true except where general intelligence is at work. It probably takes more complexity to encode an organism that can multiply 7 by 8 and can multiply 432 by 8902 but cannot multiply 6 by 13 than to encode an organism that can do all three,”
This is just a property of algorithms in general, not of general intelligence specifically. Writing a Python/C/assembler program to multiply A and B is simpler than writing a program to multiply A and B unless A % B = 340. It depends on whether you’re thinking of multiplication as an algorithm or a giant lookup table (http://lesswrong.com/lw/l9/artificial_addition/).
“is true except where general intelligence is at work. It probably takes more complexity to encode an organism that can multiply 7 by 8 and can multiply 432 by 8902 but cannot multiply 6 by 13 than to encode an organism that can do all three,”
This is just a property of algorithms in general, not of general intelligence specifically. Writing a Python/C/assembler program to multiply A and B is simpler than writing a program to multiply A and B unless A % B = 340. It depends on whether you’re thinking of multiplication as an algorithm or a giant lookup table (http://lesswrong.com/lw/l9/artificial_addition/).