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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jmucchiello" data-source="post: 3620445" data-attributes="member: 813">I don't believe in elves or unicorns either. Yet weekly I play a game in which both feature. Go figure.They are analog.I realize the following is a setting proposition but....When have you ever accidentally programmed a word processor when that wasn't your intent?That is not true. Neurons are extremely analog in practice. You may feel a neuron only fires or doesn't fire, but the chemistry behind that "decision" is not binary. There are a pair of chemicals that exist in a variety of states of balance and when the head of the neuron receives input from the previous neuron, whether that cell will propagate the signal depends on the balance of their chemicals. Other neurons in the brain regulate the balance and thus the decision for moving the signal forward can viewed as yes/no externally, it is not so simple locally.I've programmed assembly language. Bootstrapping old mainframes use to be done by flipping physical switches on a panel then applying power to the system. The TI99/4a computer's microprocessor ran p-code, which is the internal language of UCSD pascal and writing directly to p-code isn't really that hard. Modern programmers may not program binary but programming at the machine level is still around, anyone writing a device driver will write some of it assembly language.This is a strawman argument. Compilers translate what you SAY into machine code. Programmers usually don't MEAN what they SAY. This is how bugs occur.Laws of probably for one? Are you actually saying that Microsoft Word is just a few bugs away from sentience? If I take a hex editor and change 3 or 4 '0x34's to '0x87' will I create life? Not 3 or 4? How many bugs are talking about then? 10-20? 1000-2000? 1,000,000-2,000,000? Even if it is only 3 or 4, there are (let's say) 10 million bytes making up Word. Making 3 random changes to 10,000,000 bytes gives us 255^3*10,000,000 combinations to try. That's 16,581,375,000,000 combinations. If it takes me 1 second to try each combination (and who here can launch MS Word in 1 second) I would need over 1/2 a million years to try each combination. Using a linear search, odds are I find my sentient MS Word variant in half that time, so I need only 1/4 million years. That is why a couple random bugs will not result in sentience.Let me humor this with another question, how does it reprogram itself? It can't read it's own source code in C++ since it has glitches and these glitches aren't in the source code. So it has to find it's spark of creativity. To do this it needs to recompiles its source code (who leaves source code and a compiler on the production server) and compare itself to the source code. Wait!! First it needs to take a class in C++. I'm sure no one added heuristics to this organization program so that it could also analyze C++ programs. Short of poking random sequences of numbers into its bytes stream and hoping for the best, this program will not know how to modify itself.Humans are able to adapt to changing conditions but this usually doesn't require that we modify our DNA to do it. There's no reason to suppose a running AI program is aware of its own bytes any more so than we are aware of electrical impulses traveling through our brains.</blockquote>

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