I would love to be able to design a computer program that was smart and actually had some intelligence. I have designed the AI for my 3D connect four program and I’ve worked on a chatbot. The real sign of intelligence would be if it could learn. In fact, I have thought about making my connect four program be able to learn from its losses. The end result of all this AI work would be to simulate the human mind. There would be 2 ways of doing this. The first would be to understand the thought process of everyone and write some code to simulate it. This, of course, is impossible. The second way would be to somehow analyze the physics and chemistry of the brain and try to replicate the actual electronic signals or cells and see what happens when we connect it all together. I doubt that we can ever really replicate the brain as a computer; even though computing power keeps increasing exponentially, I don’t think it will reach the computing power of the human brain at any point.

I’m not really sure what I think about the war on Iraq. At first I thought we should definitely let the weapons inspectors continue because they hadn’t found anything yet. I was hoping that Iraq could be disarmed peacefully. I hoped that Bush’s war stance was just a bluff to get Iraq to allow inspections and then to destroy weapons. But the weapons inspectors were apparently not very useful. Then Bush wanted to attack without any public proof of weapons of mass destruction. Many of the bits of evidence against Iraq that were brought were proved to be false by the inspectors. So I assumed with the international community wanting inspections to continue and no proof from the inspectors, that we should let them try to find weapons. I don’t think war without any international support was a great idea. It seems this could seriously damage our relationship with countries like France, Germany, and Russia. It seems a little strange that France, Germany, and Russia were all so opposed to the attack and then once we go in they say if Saddam uses his chemical weapons they’ll come to our aide. So they want the inspections to continue but they know he has weapons of mass destruction? I don’t quite understand France, Germany, and Russia side of this. If we did have definitive proof that Iraq has weapons, then the inspections are pretty useless and perhaps we do need to go to war. So with proof of Saddam having these weapons I do agree that we need to disarm him. If war is the only way to do that then I suppose I agree with the war. International support would have been nice though. The hard question is, where do you draw the line and who we go after. There are obviously other dictators that have weapons of mass destruction. Are we going after Saddam because of links to Al-Queda, because of the family history with Bush, or because he has defied all the UN resolutions? North Korea is developing weapons again against the rule of the UN, but they are being public about it. Do we attack them? Do we just go after every nation that has weapons of mass destruction?