Jason H. wrote, and Anthony Cerrato replied:

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!
:-))

I'm not sure whether Tony C is saying that (having read the link) he now
thinks Jason was right, or whether he is being sarcastic.

The Deep Blue programmers certainly wouldn't have been the first lot of
programmers who didn't know precisely how their creation worked, and they
won't be the last. That doesn't mean they have created intelligence, or
that the program worked correctly just because it won a short contest.

It reminds me of a Star Trek episode* where the brilliant scientist
imprinted his mind onto his 9th generation super-computer, without realising
that he was in fact a megalomaniac. The computer then tried to take over
the Federation and it was only the resourcefulness of Captain Kirk that
saved the day.
Just imagine if some incorrectly-programmed self-programming nanobot
population decided to eat the entire Milky Way Galaxy because it thought it
was a good idea. It would make today's computer viruses look pretty
pathetic, wouldn't it?

In an earlier post Tony C wrote:
Sure--comets have plenty raw materials and the Oort cloud
enough for millions of years at least. And solar energy is
out there galore--besides, why does ComputerDoctor assume
oil is the only source of energy even on Earth; besides
solar, wind, water wave, and geothermal, just 2 words,
nuclear energy (fission and fusion!)

The critical point is that oil is so vital because it is the fuel that
drives TODAY's civilisation and therefore it HAS to be the bridge to the
future. Nuclear energy is no good because it takes so much oil to build a
nuclear power plant that the plant spends its first fifteen years paying
back that energy, and only then does it produce a positive 'net energy' .
And if the price of oil sky-rockets, as it certainly will, that makes
building nuclear power plants even more 'net energy' negative.

Of course there will still be the raw materials lying around, such as
hydrated Calcium Sulphate, but to make cement to make concrete to build a
nuclear power station you first need to bake it into anhydrous Calcium
Sulphate, and to do that you need lots of energy, and to get that energy you
need a nuclear power station ....
And concrete is surely the least of your worries if you are going to build a
nuclear power plant.
Don't forget to build a waste storage system that will last a 100,000 years
and more.

At 5%pa compounding growth, it takes 14 years to double your principal. So
if (say) we have already consumed half of all the commercially recoverable
oil, we are 14 years from running out - and that is less than the pay-back
time for nuclear plants. I can hear you super-optimists saying "but if the
price goes up there is more commercially recoverable oil", but the economy
will go bankrupt a long time before that. The US and Japanese economies are
bankrupt already and only survive because so many powerful/rich people own
so many pieces of US paper that they are forced to buy more US Government
Bonds to protect their paper investments.

Back in the 1960s the US was the richest nation in the world. Then it ran
out of oil and had to start importing it, and now it is the poorest country
in the world, with a National Debt of $5 trillion , or something equally
ridiculous. It is an unsustainable bubble.

Solar, wind, waves, geothermal (and don't forget wood - some countries are
still deforesting themselves to cook their food) , (and don't forget cow
dung - which should be returned to the soil to keep it fertile, but is used
for cooking) - none of these can be expanded without the use of more oil
that we don't have.

* I enjoy science fiction, but don't confuse it with science.

Merry Christmas