A Computer Program That Thinks For Itself

Technically, Stephen Thaler has written more music than any composer in the world. He also invented the Oral-B CrossAction toothbrush and devices that search the Internet for messages from terrorists. He has discovered substances harder than diamonds, coined 1.5 million new English words, and trained robotic cockroaches. Technically.
Thaler, the president and chief executive of Imagination Engines in Maryland Heights, Mo., gets credit for all those things, but he is really just "the man behind the curtain," he said. The real inventor is a computer program called a Creativity Machine.
What Thaler has created is essentially "Thomas Edison in a box," said Rusty Miller, a government contractor at General Dynamics and one of Thaler's chief cheerleaders.
"His first patent was for a Device for the Autonomous Generation of Useful Information," the official name of the Creativity Machine, Miller said. "His second patent was for the Self-Training Neural Network Object. Patent No. 2 was invented by Patent No. 1. Think about that. Patent No. 2 was invented by Patent No. 1!"
Supporters say the technology is the best simulation of what goes on in human brains, and the first truly thinking machine.