[John Rogers]

We cover this in a couple of the introduction computer classes I teach and usually it is when someone asks about computers getting smarter than humans or why a computer acts strange suddenly or there seems to be a bug, etc, etc. My responses are like this.... as noted in earlier posts the computers do what we tell them to do, I.E. lines of computer code that execute instructions. Where the weirdness comes in is due to lack of memory or overwriting existing code in a memory area that is not supposed to be shared. In all cases the computer is not "thinking" but has run out of the possible choices to take action. In some cases when this happens the code can be reset such as used to happen with the ADA programming language where it would make decisions on past actions and actually came close to "thinking". This was supposed to help our first cruise missiles fly more accurately and actually be able to make corrections based on existing parameters and readings.

ADA got overcome by C++, JAVA and others and they are more towards regular programs that just do stuff. With the ADA programs I worked on, we still had to program in possible choices and possible actions but the choices were allowed to be flexible so it was a sort of AI you could say.