What is combinatorial explosion?

Combinatorial explosion is the exponential growth rate at which most programs grow. The goal of AI is to avoid the combinatorial explosion issue as much as possible.

The combinatorial explosion issue occurs when a number of possible combinations are created by increasing the number of entities. A small increase in the number of entities quickly increases the number of computations that need to be done and will cause it to reach the computational limit.

The following graph clearly visualizes the problem:

Number of combinations vs problem size
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