People achieve the most complex use of language and concepts when engaged in problem solving. Whether the problem is as simple as multiplying nine times eighty-two or as difficult as proving a mathematical theorem, the thought processes are not easy to analyze.
None of the traditional theories that attempt to explain thinking in terms of associations or S-R connections has proved adequate to the task. We saw that language acquisition involves more than associating strings of words. So too, there is more to solving a problem than simply following a chain of stimuli and responses from some initial cue to an eventual solution
We often sort through and reorganize a great deal of information processed may have been stored in memory or may have been immediately available in the environment. The nature of his problem-solving activity has many similarities to the way information is processed by a high-speed computer.
These similarities have led to some interesting efforts to formulate models of human thinking based on the methods and procedures developed for programming and organizing computer systems.
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Today computers are able to handle easily many tasks previously performed only by human beings. Computers balance bank accounts, figure payrolls, prepare tax returns, control manufacturing plants, translate foreign-language material, play reasonably good games of chess, and so forth. In fact, many of the tasks that 20 years ago we would have all agreed required thinking can now be done by computers. Does this mean that computers can indeed “think”?
An immediate answer in the negative = that they can do only what they have been programmed to do-is too glib. Perhaps a human thinker can do only what he has been programmed to do also, either by inheritance or training. It is clear that a wide continuum of intellectual behavior describes human organisms; it is an open question just how far out on this continuum we can push the computer.