Idiot Savant

The brain is a funny thing, automatically associating one thing with other things. Computers are surprisingly bad at this - while really good at brute force, exhaustive searching (for example, IBM's Deep Blue champion chess playing computer), nobody has been able to make a computer that will pass the Turing Test - basically, fool a human into thinking that the computer is another person.

So computers remain Idiot Savants - frighteningly good at a very narrow set of problems, and hopeless at what we would expect from a normally bright child.

For example - and to show that I'm at least comparable to a normally bright child - I saw this on Al Gore's Intarwebz.


My warped brain immediately thought of the old Animaniacs TV show, and the "Mime Time" segment that they would have.


A computer doesn't have a sense of humor, warped or not. It also tends not to do well making associations like this, at least without a lot of programming work. Amazon's "People who bought this also bought these other things" is not an artificial intelligence example; rather, it's tapping into the "Wisdom of Crowds" to let people make the associations. A computer would pick mostly really inappropriate suggestions, like the idiot savant that it is.