Outthinking Your Computer

No. Computers do not think and I doubt, no matter what scientists say, they truly ever shall. Why? Nothing is so devious, creative, unreliable or unpredictable as the human mind. We also make mistakes. Part of our magnificence is that we have emotions and to our thinking, we unwittingly or not, add these wonders. The computer is not human. It is emotionless. Man feeds the computer's memory and its memory is far better than ours. What goes into the machine can be sorted, blended, juxtaposed and transformed but the machine, does and uses, only combinations of what it is fed. Humans without all of the electronics and the uses of power sources other than their built-in own, can create. They can  instantly come up with an idea that is unique to a situation.  And it can make mistakes and correct them or make those mistakes turn into successes. Computers shouldn't make mistakes. They just plug along with what we put into them in one way or another and re-arrange those data according to how their makers have planned. All that being said, taking this to ridiculous conclusions, I know that we can out-think computers. Sometimes. We can learn their patterns as they do ours. We can predict their actions just as they do. But we operate outside the box. Literally. The reason I know this, is that I am an avid Hearts player and I play it against a computer. Same with Bridge, and a whole lot of other games I enjoy when I am not writing or reading on the Box thing. And "thing" it is. Sure. I talk to it, just as you do and often cuss at it but it remains utterly expressionless. During my games of Hearts, a simple game requiring little in the way of mental activity but much in not wanting to throttle the computer when I seems unfairly to present me too often with that dreaded Queen of Spades. But, I can "trick" the machine quite often. Knowing that the computer who is the other three players,  I  have come to ken its patterns because being a simple game, they are limited, to a degree. By discarding certain cards in a game or playing the cards in a certain sequence based on previous patterns noted, it is possible to kind of "foil" the computer so that winning can be accomplished. It doesn't work every time, but when it does, and you back the computer into a corner, it's a sweet feeling. I am not sure, but game makers, I believe, try not to lose customers by beating them every time. They could. If you have control of three hands in a four-handed game such as Bridge, they have a big advantage. And they don't baby you, but they can allow, just as the Vegas and Reno machines do, winning to occur just enough to keep you playing. No one, and I know a couple of keen Bridge players with "card memory", can be sure where every card probably is and where many are, for certain. But the computer can and does. In the meantime, the computers are great opponents because they don't gibe. Or do they? Sometimes, I feel my computer when I have been beaten repeatedly, just might be silently laughing at me in neat steely winner's smugnificence.