The way I see it is, the Doctor can, and has expanded his programming well beyond his original design. When he’s in his mobile emitter, he’s running on future tech that has to be superior to Data’s. Data can’t easily upgrade himself.
The thing about Data is, he’s a unique AI that no one has been able to duplicate. That doesn’t mean the Federation hasn’t advanced its expertise in AI though. By the end of Voyager, there were sentient holograms running around all over the place. A minor glitch in the holodeck could get you an AI.
The fact that Data is sentient and all, isn’t really that impressive. Is it? What is impressive about Data I guess is that someone was able to put it all together the way they did with Data.
Holographic technology and new, more powerful computers do basically the same thing all the time.
Data. He’s less whiny. I mean, it depends on the specific competition. But generally Data is more focused on his duty and less distracted by his ego. And he even sings.
The mobile emitter is irrelevant. It’s from the future yes, but it doesn’t give the Doctor any special abilities other than range and data compression. His programming is still the same as it is when tied to the ship’s computers.
And it only took Data one movie to get used to his emotions. The Doctor had to process various different aspects of humanity in disparate episodes. It took some serious jury rigging to fix damage caused by him not being designed for long term use or serious ethical dilemmas.
The Mark 2 started adapting pretty quick though. I think he had the capability to go beyond the Mark 1. I do agree that holograms had passed androids though and part of the reason Starfleet gave up on trying to understand Data was because holograms were just as or more powerful and were more convenient.
A confrontation between The Doctor and Data would be very by-the-books.
The Doctor would immediately recognize Data’s big, glaring weakness, his inability to truly understand human emotion, and set up a scenario where Data’s cold logic will play against him.
Data, in one of those classic Data moments, will realize what’s going on and have a little soliloquy in which he logically arrives at a way to perform / act / behave in a fashion that mirrors human emotion.
The Doctor will give a half-smile and make a pithy remark about how proud he is of Data for learning to feel, or at least learning to try. He will then exploit Data’s faux-emotional response and win anyways. A sonic screwdriver would probably be involved.
The collars around their necks are forcing them to. I’ll put 40 Quatloos on the Doctor. He can be as strong as the force fields that make him up allow him to be, and whereas Data uses the computer, the Doctor effectively is the computer. Brains and brawn.
Maybe Data could win when it came to who was better at rockin’ his gold for the ladies, but that’s about it.
Actually, having just looked it up, Data would win at that, hands down. He’s built to be fully functional sexually and can carry a tune as well, whereas The Doctor’s pretty stuffy and as well-endowed as a Ken doll. So the Doctor could arm wrestle Data over a girl and win, but there’d be no point.
Yeah, Data was Science Officer. I don’t remember him assisting medically all that much.
OTOH, the Doctor wasn’t much help fixing the ship (except those bio gel thingies) either.
I read someplace the Doctor had something like 3000 cultures and surgical experts in his programming. Somewhere else I read he was programmed with maybe a million surgical procedures. He was adaptable enough to invent new medical breakthroughs. I’m pretty sure he was winging it when Neelix had his lungs stolen by some tissue-thieves and he kept him alive with holographic lungs.
The mobile emitter is what would make me throw my vote in with Data. While it was never addressed that well in the series (to my knowledge…maybe it was) that device just came off as way to vulnerable to make an EMH a reliable and versatile member of a crew outside of a protected and secure holo matrix (mobile or static).