Dear Praghalathan,

Douglas Hofstadter has written a book called " Godel, Escher and Bach", where he discusses recursiveness and self-referencing as a basis of intelligence. The book meanders leisurely through mathematics, art, music, computers and AI and makes very interesting reading though a good bit of the material goes over the head of a lay reader. Want to try it? It is in our library - Dr.Rao's gift to the PGs here.

Sathya.

Artificial Intelligence

While the software engineers are endeavouring in creating a computer with human intelligence, some scientists in Massachussets Institue of Technology have developed a new idea.

Their Idea is based on the Hypothesis which says,
"Humanoid intelligence requires humanoid interactions with the world."

This hypothesis says that, for a machine to have human-like intelligence, that machine should have all the sensory inputs of the normal human(visual, auditory, touch, equilibrium/assessing acceleration, etc..).

So, their final creation would be a Humanoid-Robot.
And that robot is expected to think and feel like humans.
Though this may take some long years for the scientists.

http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/humanoid-robotics-group/cog/overview.html

PS: There are essentially 2 school of thoughts among the scientists regarding Artificial Intelligence.
One says that AI is not possible at all(that means to simulate the human brain 100% is not possible) and the other says that Human brain is just a computer made of Meat(which means even our human brains use the logical and algorithmic process used by computers, so it can be mimicked by high level engineering).[u]