really? then who writes the compilers i wonder......

Wow, I must send this to Bill Gates...*wonders if this is the correct language he speaks*

000101010110011101010001110101....ROFL

Yeah, but don't worry. The way I see it after the machines have taken over they'll start work on artificial humans and eventually some foolish machine will give them reproductive organs causing them to start making new humans without the help of the machines. Eventually the humans will take over the robo-Earth leaving us right back at square one.

Just noticed, it sounds like you just saw that movie that was just released into VHS/DVD a while ago. "I, Robot" lol.

I don't know about this nobody writing machine code thing... a lot of embedded systems practically necessitate it. I wrote copious amounts of assembler this past semester.

But, anyhow, this reminds me of a story. One of the coolest hacks of all time was one by Ken Thompson, who was responsible for much of the code in early Unix. He rewrote the program that controlled logins to have a backdoor for him, which is a simple enough hack and not a very effective one when others can look at the source code--so he modified the compiler to detect when someone was compiling the login program and automatically insert his backdoor. But that wasn't enough, since people could look at the code for the compiler. So he wrote code foe the compiler to detect when it was compiling itself and inserted the code that inserts the login backdoor. The compiler would then virally propogate his login backdoor as people compiled code using it. (http://www.science.uva.nl/~mes/jargon/b/backdoor.html)

So.. while AI might not quite be there yet, it's not too much of a stretch.

Ever since I was younger I've always had this desire to create artificial intelligence that was very simular to a human beings way of thinking...

it's weird, just has been a desire of mine and it's really what brought me into the desire to learn how to code in the first place. Then I realized I know video games, so might as well use that ability.

Some day I'd actually like to try tackling AI though :)

Would disprove a lot of theories as well as make us realize how much machine we actually are since if it was possible to write human intelligence into a machine, we wouldn't be just magically intelligent anymore, you'd see the clockworks finally. This would probably help the deterministic approach though, since you'd probably have to use pure logic to decipher a lot. Think about it this way, if you could prove that we really weren't making choices at all, and all our decisions are a product of reason (as in when you choose a food to eat, the foods you don't want to eat really aren't choices, and the food you desire most may outweigh the rest the others were just illusions of choices) and thus also show that we are products of our nurtured background, think of the moral and ethical complications that could arise. As well as the problems of religion, since if we really aren't making choices then why would god create us if there's no choice to be made and thus no test to be made?

Do we really make choices, or is it all just an illusion? Ooooo....

excuse me, since this is one of the first times I've actually drank and I drank because a friend I hadn't seen in a year basically wanted me to drink as a christmas present lol... I didn't drink much (only a few beers) but wow... walking feels funny.

CNN) -- Scientists at the University of the West of England (UWE) have designed a robot that does not require batteries or electricity to power itself.

Instead, it generates energy by catching and eating houseflies.

Dr Chris Melhuish and his Bristol-based team hope the robot, called EcoBot II, will one day be sent into zones too dangerous for humans, potentially proving invaluable in military, security and industrial areas.

Reminds me of the end of an Isaac Asmiov story, in which people dislike human-shaped robots so much that the company which makes the robots builds a robot which eats fruit flies. The last bit of the story shows two human-shaped robots in storage having a conversation, in which they state that they are both human-like enough to be human, and that they are the only humans worth being saved by robots. Or something to that general effect.