How intelligent can a computer be? May be you can get the answer after reading the following passage about a newly-developed US computer program called Smarter Child and the Internet.
If you ran into Smarter Child online, you would be surprised at this kid's huge memory. It can recite many facts. For example, Smarter Child knows every baseball player in every team this season.
He knows every word in the dictionary and the weather in every major city areas across the US. However, if you ask Smarter Child other questions, you get strange answers. A question about Smarter Child's age returns, "One year, 11 days, 16 hours, 7 minutes, and 47 seconds!" Asking where he lives, "In a clean room in a high-tech building in California."
Smarter Child uses the huge information on the World Wide Web as his memory bank. To answer questions about spelling, for instance, Smarter Child goes to American Heritage Dictionary online. For the weather, he visits www. intellicast. com.
Some scientists believe that by joining the many systems of the Internet, an artificial being with the combined knowledge of, say, Albert Einstein, Richard Nixon and Britney Spears could be born. However, if Smarter Child wants to think and learn on his own like the boy-computer David in the movie A. I. Artificial Intelligence, he must solve two problems.
The first is that computers find it difficult to read web pages because the files are sorted in different ways. That's why programmers need to tell Smarter Child where to look for the weather. It would be a much more difficult task to let him find it himself.
Another problem is that while Smarter Child can deal with information more exactly and faster than any human, he lacks(缺少) common sense—a basic grounding of knowledge that is obvious(明显的) to any young child.
