ed your search criteria with the contents of millions of web pages. Yahoo has ranked these comparisons according to the closest match, and it has ordered these pages according to rank. Comparing, ordering, and ranking all require thinking. And these are all tasks that the computer is able to do. This may not seem like very complex thinking, but never the less these simple tasks do require thinking.When you take what the computer is exactly doing it may not seem very much like thinking at all. The computer uses a set of rules to determine the order of things, and to compare things. It assigns a value to what it is comparing then orders the items. When looked at in detail it may not seem like thinking at all, but when you take a step back and look at what the computer is actually doing, it does look like thinking. The computer is able to find what you want buy the words you type. Human thought might not seem so advanced when taken down to a low level. If you were able to look at every single thing that happens when a person processes a simple thought, like comparing two things, it may not look very much like thinking either. Unfortunately we don’t know exactly what goes on, every detailed step that goes into comparing two things in the human brain, so how can we compare the step by step process that a computer takes to do a simple task, to the overall process that a person takes to accomplish a simple task? We can’t, so we have to compare what the computer can do against what a person can do. So comparing two things seems like thinking to me, and a computer can do this.Searching through millions of pages of text is not the only thing that computers can do. Computers can also learn to recognize voice. When you get a voice recognition program you have to teach the computer your voice. By saying words the computer tunes it’s ears to your voice so that it can recognize what you are saying. This requires some...
