Artificial intelligence: Computers do not think, they "shuffle bits"

In response to an item I wrote on whether computers really think, friend Gil Dodgen, author of the highly acclaimed computer program, World Championship Checkers, writes to say

As you know, I've been involved in AI programming for many years.

One of my greatest joys was meeting, knowing, and challenging Marion Tinsley to games of checkers with my computer program. See here:

I could tell you many amazing stories about Tinsley. He was a true genius and prodigy, and a devout born-again Christian. He had a major influence on me, and I had the opportunity to share with him, just shortly before he died, my conversion from atheism to Christianity.

I once told Marion that my computer program doesn't even know it's playing checkers; it just shuffles bits. I mentioned this comment to my programming colleague Ed (with whom I computed the only perfect-play endgame databases for the game of checkers, corrected Jonathan Schaeffer's win-loss-draw databases, and developed a chess-variant program called Gothic Vortex), and Ed dubbed me The Master Bit-Shuffler.

And that's all computer programs do: shuffle bits. This has nothing whatsoever to do with real intelligence or creativity.

That said, a book, One Jump Ahead, has been written about Tinsley's legacy.

And Gil, of all people should know about real intelligence and creativity. He is also a superb piano player, as this will demonstrate.

See also:

Conversing with computers, or with their programmers?

Also just up at The Mindful Hack ...

Artificial intelligence: Getting computers to pretend to converse is an " extremely hard computational problem"

Spirituality: Churches nobody goes to any more vs. the "ancient and ever new" ones

Brain: The turtle really did beat the rabbit, you know ...

Spirituality and the arts: High time someone said this

The Mindful Hack is my blog that supports The Spiritual Brain (Beauregard and O'Leary, 2007) .