thompson's dog
the blog about schroedinger's god reminded me of one of my college computer science professors. the problem was real world knowledge. what's a dog? you know what a dog is. and i know what a dog is. but try teaching a computer. dog's have four legs, fur, a tail, etc. but a three legged dog is still a dog, right? professor thompson imagined taking away the dog neutrino by neutrino. his challenge was to define the exact moment when the dog stopped being a dog. silly. but it's exactly the problem you run into when you try to make a computer think like a person.