Pattern matching has unbeatable performance benefits, at least for our current computers.<p>If you go deep in numerical calculus, you&#x27;ll see that our computers are must better fit to work with continuous smooth functions than they are for discrete noise-like data. So, all the power goes to the people that turn their knowledge into a smaller set of interpolated curves. (And yes, I think that&#x27;s very counter intuitive.)<p>Anyway, I&#x27;m not convinced this is a fundamental property of CS. It sounds at least possible that different architectures could have different constraints, and make symbolic AI viable. But it those would need to be very different architectures, not based on the Von Neuman or Turing&#x27;s ideas at all.