thinking. People also have to learn to recognize voice. When a person is a baby, voices don’t make much sense. When you say “goo goo gaga” to a baby, it doesn’t know the difference between that and “are you hungry?”. It all sounds like noise, until the baby learns that certain sounds mean certain things. Same with a computer, certain sounds mean certain words. Now, I am not going to argue that the computer understands the meaning of what you say, but it can understand what words you are saying. You have probably heard of the IBM super computer Deep blue and how it beet the chess master Garry Kasparove. I doubt I could beet him, and most other people couldn't either. But this computer did. Each time Garry made a move the computer searched through millions and millions of possible moves (up to 200 million per second) and picked the best one. Now, that probably doesn't sound like your typical idea of thinking, but if you look at what the computer did in detail, I think you will see various traits that we do when we think. First of all the computer searches through it's huge database of information. This is much like when we search our memory. Next the computer analyzes and compares various moves, we compare things all the time. Then the computer picks the best move from these comparisons.Another area where you can find examples of computers thinking is in computer games. Games utilize "intelligent" strategies. This helps to create a more enjoyable gaming experience. Some games can develop different strategies to make game play more realistic and challenging. For example if you die in a level of the game and you restart that level, you might think you will already know what to look out for because you have already played part of that level, but the computer can remember that you played and can change the games variable to make it more difficult for you. Sony has recently developed an...
