This chess position doesn't defeat computers. A decent engine will draw this every time. But the disparity in the efficiency of line of reasoning (a humans' bei

This chess position doesn't defeat computers. A decent engine will draw this every time. But the disparity in the efficiency of line of reasoning (a humans' being much more efficient than a computers for this problem) illustrates the value add of a programmer to a computer, and what the job of computer programming really is. Computers basically know nothing--which is good and bad. It's good because they don't require much convincing before performing boring, repetitive tasks. They simply don't know or care that a given task is repetitive or boring, or even useful or not useful, so they will keep chugging along until they can return their output. The downside of this is that if they are to know anything at all, they must be programmed to know it. They can also learn through evolutionary iterations once programmed conceptively. One could conceive of a computer program that would spit out random logical relationships to describe a large set of data, (what humans might refer to as "life experiences") and prune the logical statements until they eventually returned accurate logic describing the data. But this would require large quantities of generations for pruning, and careful programming of heuristics for logical evaluation at inception. We can observe that our brains are born out of a system of evolution that has already undergone such processes. We have had a powerful survival heuristic on our genetic program for developing a broad set of skills, including logical reasoning, and it has been running for billions of years, pruning countless generations to give rise to our inherent level of intelligence that can discover logical shorcuts like the one in this problem. The evolutionary process also gives rise to possibly illogical but robust sets of skills, since survival and procreation are hueristically more valuable than being logically perfect in reasoning. Sure, theoretically, and given sufficient computing resources and time, a man made computer system could approximately match and even exceed the human capacity for discovering logical shortcuts. But when paired with a competent human programmer, or team of programmers, the programmers can vastly reduce the time and resources required to achieve this process of intelligent evolution, and produce intelligent programs much more quickly than a computer program left to simply evolve it's intelligence on its own. It took us humans quite a while to get here. Why would we assume that a computer could evolve faster than us, autonomously, without being programmed by us to do so? It is possible I suppose, but it's even more unlikely than the evolution of human intelligence, which sure, it happened autonomously, but over a course of billions of years.