Why AI needs a physical body to reach its potential

Early AI research often produced good results on small numbers of combinations of a problem (like noughts and crosses, known as toy problems) but would not scale up to larger ones like chess (real-life problems). Fortunately, modern AI has developed alternative ways of dealing with such problems. These can beat the world's best human players, not by looking at all possible moves ahead, but by looking a lot further than the human mind can manage. It does this by using methods involving approximations, probability estimates, large neural networks and other machine-learning techniques.