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Message: <blockquote data-quote="der_kluge" data-source="post: 2761380" data-attributes="member: 945">I had a program a LONG time ago that was an AI simulator for a cockroach. This was a neural net program that attempted to recreate a cockroach as it moved around a smallish room, navigating by feeling and sensing its' environment. It had a little graphical image of a roach that had some antenna and that was about it.  I thought it was wicked cool. The important point about this program is that it was state of the art for its time, and recreated the exact neural network (I guess as well as could be understood) of an actual cockroach. The kicker was that it ran just fine on my 286 computer.I imagine that a high end computer nowadays might be able to recreate something much more sophisticated like the neural network of a butterfly or maybe even a shrew.But we are still a long way away from being able to accurately create a human's thought processes. First off, we don't even understand a human's thought processes. So, at best, we can only simulate them.I think the important thing to understand is that a computer has to learn just like a human has to learn. I think the only way this can be accomplished is to create a program that has the capacity to observe and form impressions about the world, and build a database of information. Just like a toddler, it would learn as it advanced, and gathered information from around itself. You have to start somewhere. I think it's naive to believe that we can just create a genius computer. Think about all the little facts that you know about the world you live in, and take for granted. Things like "umbrelllas keep me dry in the rain" or "Carpet can be used to generate static electricity". I had an idea in college of creating a recursing program that would read through dictionary entries. When it encountered a word, it would recurse to that word to understand it, and then go back to the original entry in order to build a complete picture. So, if it started with "aardvark" it would read "a small animal" - so then maybe it didn't understand what "small" meant, so it would flip over to understand small, and assuming that it got that, it would then come back and read "animal" and then it would recurse down to try to understand what an "animal" was, and having figured that out, then it could come back and finish the definition of an aardvark. You would have to build in thousands of base words just so it could get somewhere, and not infinitely recurse on itself. Theoretically, once you were done, the program would "know" everything in the world, since it would have it's own internal dictionary of information that gave it its' view of the world.  Computers are no where near being able to do this.I doubt we'll see it in our lifetime.</blockquote>

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