18th June 2003, 11:34 AM
That's Star Trek. That show knows nothing about programming, and it seems to have learned nothing about it since then. An actual robot wouldn't have responded like that, because a robot would have to be PROGRAMMED to not only take everything someone says as literal (symbolism is indeed something a machine can be programmed to understand in phrases, one phrase at a time, just as we learn the phrases, for after all even normal phrases would also have to be programmed in for the machine to understand them), but also to analyze and reanalyze something it doesn't understand in an infinite loop (and Fry's an idiot), which would be a huge mistake. Let's not forget that there's no reason a robot would explode just because the program crashed. The guy who made that robot was obviously an idiot. Maybe he should remove the TNT from the updated schematics.... Gir, reporting for duty!
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)