Question

@Mathematics @Computer Science "Surely computers cannot be intelligent - they only do what their programmers tell them to do!". Is the latter statement true? Explain.

Answer 1

#include <stdio.h>

main()
{
printf("Hello, World!");
}

Answer 2

depends on how intelligence is measured. Web-crawlers can definitely tell me things about lots of things I know nothing about--while doing advanced mathematics that I cant do...

Answer 3

I'd say it's true. As a matter of fact a CPU does its cycle of "Fetching,operand assembly, execute"

All a computer does is to read an alghoritm a programmer wrote, and execute it.

Answer 4

I guess my question really depends on the definition of "intelligent" and "tell" on that statement.

Answer 5

However, all I know is that what a programmer commands a computer to do can actually be very different from what the computer ends up doing!

Answer 6

so i think you are right

Answer 7

@alfie
I think I remember reading recently that MIT is working on programs that can crawl the net asking other crawlers for algorithms to use to do complex computing

Answer 8

True, but any computer yet invented has no such thing as the human brain ideas association. It's all stored in a memory (Let it be RAM or ROM, w/e), and it gets the number where it is supposed to read the data stored.

Our brain is not made of numbers, when you tell a computer to do something (assuming the expression is correct) it executes such thing and it ends up there, there is no "thinking" (Unless the programmer specified so).
Human brain is way more complex, we can think of solutions even though we don't know how to do something, we have intuition. No computer has intuition at the moment. Of course it can link something at something, but that's not even close to human's brain intuition.

Answer 9

Computers can be trained to recognize patterns.

Answer 10

"Computers can be PROGRAMMED to recognize patterns."
Fixed that for you :)

Answer 11

not just programmed, but trained.