• Question: Computers are intelligent or not?And why?

    Asked by blackheb to James, Marcus, Martin, Rob, Suzanne on 19 Mar 2012.
    • Photo: Suzanne McEndoo

      Suzanne McEndoo answered on 19 Mar 2012:

      Computers are currently only as intelligent as the person using them. They can only do what you tell them to do (or they are programmed by someone else to do). We can simulate intelligence, making computers that can have a conversation that sounds almost exactly like a human (there’s a bit more about this idea here http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/turing-test/)

      True artificial intelligence is still a way off though.

    • Photo: James Boone

      James Boone answered on 19 Mar 2012:

      Computers aren’t intelligent because they cannot think for themselves. If we ask them to solve a maths problem by specifying very carefully what we want them to calculate, they will be able to do it very easily. However, you can’t ask a computer a philosophical question and expect it to provide an answer. They are good at doing what they’re told basically, but not good at thinking for themselves (yet).

    • Photo: Marcus Gallagher-Jones

      Marcus Gallagher-Jones answered on 20 Mar 2012:

      At the moment computers are not capable of abstract thought I.e. thinking about something outside the context of the current situation. They are only as clever as the person programming them. If you are interested in artificial intelligence I suggest reading a bit more about this guy:

      http://www.turing.org.uk/turing/

    • Photo: Robert Thompson

      Robert Thompson answered on 20 Mar 2012:

      Computers can only do what you tell them. So you can’t really class them as beiing intelligent or not. I don’t really want computers to be able to have inteligence, The movies tell us it leads to no good.

    • Photo: Martin Zaltz Austwick

      Martin Zaltz Austwick answered on 23 Mar 2012:

      There are artificial intelligence techniques to get a computer to learn from its inputs, or from its mistakes. I’m not sure how far along these are. The hardware of a human brain is very different from the hardware of a computer.

Comments