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Showing posts from April, 2011

The computer program with a will

The programmer leaned back on his chair and sighed. He had just written a perfect program. The program was complicated and could do many, many things. But it had only one purpose. To make the programmer happy. To give him pleasure. The program had many abilities. It even had its own internal concept of happiness. The program was made such that it always tried to keep its internal boolean variable - 'happy' to true. But the purpose of the program was ultimately to make the programmer happy too. So the willy programmer had put in and if condition:  if program makes me happy      program.happy=true else      program.happy=false And then the programmer did the ultimate programming. He gave the program 'free will' The program could run as it wanted. It could execute whichever line of code whenever it wanted and experience the results. The program was given a choice. It could choose to make the programmer happy or it could choose to ignore the programmer. And then the progra