I had a very long and interesting discussion with Geby earlier today (round 0100). It pretained to whether there exists a computer that has the ability to learn. Even any sort of simple learning.

The discussion evolved from this page (at wired). The article is quite interesting but I felt that landing a helicopter using that method would be overkill since a computer could do that.

Geoff countered by stating that although a computer could handle predetermined tasks, only a human (or system capable of learning) would be able to handle unanticipated situations.

I do believe that computers can learn and if you’d like to dicuss the learning ability of computers then please click here

I will try to post the text of that conversation (with Geoffs permission) at that forum thread.