capable of creativity, learning and emotions. These are the areas where computers lack the technology to compete with humans but they are working on it. Take creativity for example. Aaron, an invention of Harold Cohen, produces artwork that Cohen has no way of predicting what Aaron is going to do(Boden). Not only is the artwork an original painting but it is also pleasant to look at. Paul Hodgsons program Improviser is a music composer that plays a unique performance in real time(Boden). This does not prove that a computer has creativity in the same sense that humans do but it is a start. Human creativity springs from association. One has spontaneous thoughts or actions that are a result of many different past experiences that are related by this new thought. Copycat, the brain child of Hofstadter, is closer to this type of thought than any other program(Boden). In her article Artificial Genius Boden states Hofstadter believes that capturing the processes that make up creative thinking in a computer program is possible, given that computer could be made big enough and fast enough to rival the vast complexity of the human brain.Artificial intelligence experts are starting to mimic the human brains function of learning. Scientists at MIT are trying to create a machine that simulates the way that humans learn through the senses. The robot stated out as a baby, that is no code to base decisions on. Rodney Brooks, the developer, is concentrating on eye-hand coordination and face recognition and hoping that one day it will use the information to make discoveries of it own(Smith). Doug Lenat is trying to teach a computer common sense in hope that the computer will reason on its own(Smith). He is trying to accomplish this by manually entering over two million common sense statements such as ice is frozen. Geoffrey Yuen is developing a robot that can learn to do tasks that are too dangerous for humans. Yuen is trying to teach t...
