"Jason H." wrote in message
om...
"ComputerDoctor" wrote in message
...
Are you saying that humans are going to invent nanobots
that think for
themselves?

Probably.

- when we don't even know ourselves how we think,

We do not need to know how we think, and more importantly,
machines
programs do not need to function like a biological
computer in order
to act in apparently intelligent ways. The Turing test
only requires
the machine to execute logical functions and communicate
them in a way
that is indistinguishable from a human.

or how to write programs without bugs in,

Not every program has 'fatal-error' bugs, and many can
recover
themselves to prior 'safe' states once bugs are detected.

let alone how to write programs that re-program
themselves?

Actually, the program and the hardware to do that are
already in the
Smithsonian Museum. Deep Blue, the famous IBM machine
that beat the
then (1997)world chess champion Gary Kasparov possessed
the ability to
self-write code and the original programmers didn't know
precisely HOW
it beat Kasparov.

Consider visiting the following link


http://researchweb.watson.ibm.com/re...deepblue.shtml

Thanx for the link Jason--interesting, I hadn't known that
Deep Blue was actually considered to be "self-programming,"
even in the most limited sense. That quality is certainly a
minimal prerequisite to the building of a true AI--but most
of us I think have always considered that to be still a few
centuries away...along with Asimov's positronic robots!
:-))

"...Since the match five years ago, IBM has proposed a
grand challenge
and is currently working with academia, governments and
other
corporations to address this looming problem posed by the
complexity
of IT infrastructure. Called 'autonomic computing,' this
called for
computers to manage themselves with greater than
human-like abilities
for use across a wide range of business and commercial
applications,
from e-sourcing to data-mining to resource allocation."

Basically they were saying that IT's incredible growth is
out-pacing
the ability of human IT managers to control it, so it is
necessary for
the machines to take over the job. They are using the
'deep blue'
approach to solving this problem. It is already
under-way.

Who is going to test that the nanobots' programs don't
have bugs in?


The machines will.

And they will do a damnsight better job than Microsoft I
believe.
....tonyC


Jason H.