A controlled experiment pits a neuro-symbolic system against a vision-language-action foundation model on the same robotic manipulation task, same robot, same simulation, same evaluation protocol — and the results are devastating for the foundation model. The paper "The Price Is Not Right", accepted at ICRA 2026 in Vienna, shows that a symbolic planning system trained on one-sixth the data in thirty-four minutes achieves 95% success on robotic Towers of Hanoi where the fine-tuned pi-zero VLA achieves 34% — and on an unseen four-block generalization task, 78% versus zero. The training energy ratio is eighty to one. The inference power ratio is six to one. For structured manipulation tasks, the "just scale it" orthodoxy fails on performance, efficiency, and generalization simultaneously.
