you have to program every output, right?

[Norie]

Isn't one of the thing rules?

eg there are rules to deal with input, and there's a rule to deal with unrecognized input - even if all it does is output an error.

And isn't this one of the problems - the amount/complexity of the rules that would be needed to simulate/recreate human intelligence.

A simple task could probably be broken done into simple rules, but the more complicated the task the more rules..., the more computing power needed... etc.

 

[Andrew Fergus]

In answer to the original question 'you have to programe every output' that would also depend on the definition of output.

For instance, there is voice recognition software that (I'm guessing) learns pattern recognition applies that to unknown inputs to produce unknown outputs. One wouldn't naturally teach the software words such as juxtaposition or defenstration, but it could probably work it out without being specifically programmed.