A co-worker of mine is desperately trying to convince me that recently, somewhere, someone has built a neural net computer that has become self aware.
I find this hard to believe as I assume that it would be important enough to have made the newspapers and I would have read/heard about it.
Could it be true? Or does anyone have any idea what he may be taking about?
Richard Powers published a novel about this, named Galatea 2.2. Don’t know if that helps.
Hmmm…I can see this turning into a GD.
How would we know? I could write a program that just prints “I think therefore I am”. “Eliza” programs have convinced people that there is a real person behind the machine (i.e., passed the Turing test). What would be the criteria?
Was it built by Oliver Wendell Jones? 
Probably a misinformed reference to this:
http://www3.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2691692,00.html?chkpt=zdnn_rt_latest
More here:
http://www.t3.co.uk/news.asp?ID=705
A friend of mine sent a link to a story about that fairly recently. Can’t remember offhand where it was supposed to be. Europe, I think. Sounded like typical “give us funding for our project” PR bullcrap, though.
The Forbin Project?
[sup]Do I really need to quote one of the oldest computer jokes there is?[/sup]
The computer scientists worked and worked on the biggest computer project ever, until they had succeeded in building the world’s most powerful supercomputer that would be able to figure out any question at all. So they tested it by feeding in the eternal question: “Is there a God”?
The answer came back: “There is now!”
[sub]yuk-yuk-yuk[/sub]
Oldest computer joke there is? sigh How quickly we forget our science fiction forefathers. The original ‘joke’ is actually a one-page short story from the pen of the late, great Fredric Brown, master of the ultra-short science fiction story. He wrote it in the 50s. I guarantee you there were computer jokes before this.
Plus, you left out part of Brown’s punchline… after the computer says ‘there is now!’ it strikes its creator dead with a bolt of lightning and fuses the power switch to permanent ‘on’ position.
If you’re not familiar with Fredric Brown, I highly recommend him. His stories are funny, entertaining and unlike most of his contemporaries, completely without any pretention whatsoever.