<div dir="ltr"><br><div class="gmail_extra"><font size="4">On Tue, Apr 8, 2014 at 7:14 PM, William Flynn Wallace <<a href="mailto:foozler83@gmail.com">foozler83@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br></font><div class="gmail_quote">
<font size="4"> <br></font><blockquote style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex" class="gmail_quote"><font size="4">> It does what it is programmed to do and cannot do anything else. </font><br>
</blockquote><font size="4"><br></font></div><div class="gmail_quote"><font size="4">Then how can a computer behave in ways that the programer did not and could not expect? It would only take a few minutes to write a program to look for the first even number greater than 2 that is not the sum of two prime numbers and then stop. But will the machine ever stop? I don't know, you don't know, even the computer doesn't know. Maybe it will stop in the next 5 seconds, maybe it will stop in 50 billion years, and maybe it will never stop. If you want to know what the machine will actually do you just have to watch it and see. And just like us the machine doesn't know what it will do until it actually does it.<br>
<br></font><blockquote style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex" class="gmail_quote"><font size="4">> Any other function is just some sort of mystical belief</font><br></blockquote>
<div><br></div><div><font size="4">The only way you could be right is if 3 pounds of grey goo in a bone vat sitting on your shoulders contains some sort of mystical fuzzball thing that computers don't have and can never have. But I don't believe in mystical fuzzball things. <br>
<br></font></div><div><font size="4"> John K Clark<br></font></div><div><br></div></div><br></div></div>