Reminds me of the holodeck scene where Picard(?, Edit, Geordi) reconstructs a table with what I, at the time, thought was a pretty vague set of specifications.
Turns out the Star Trek predicted 2020's style AI behaviour rather well. Considering nuclear war is then due in 2026, that's disconcerting.
An odd one, that. After all the lore (geddit?) about Data and his brother being unique and special for their unrivalled artificial intelligence, it turned out all you have to do to exceed that is just vaguely ask a standard-issue ship computer to do so.
I think the size of the enterprise and its fusion reactor is quite an unfair advantage. Was Data really supposed to be smarter than the enterprise especially when it can read Data's mind state in order to fulfill the prompt?
I suppose the EMH is (or at least was, pre-mobile emitter from the future) a thin client for the Voyager computer.
Still seems odd that it's only apparently Data, Moriarty and the Doctor that have demonstrated the Federation actually can make pretty general AI with the tools it already has on starships (and conveniently always on the ship with all those film crews on it making the Historical Records).
Surely under the crust of some demon class planet there's a bank of millions of times that power bring used for...something.
There's probably a rule against making AI that you're allowed to break in the delta quadrant though.
There’s no direct canon confirmation, but it seems quite plausible that it was, in fact, the Bynars who provided the technological leaps necessary for the Enterprise computer to generate Moriarty and other proto-sentient characters. Riker and Picard both comment on the realism and perception of Minuet, created by the Bynars on the holodeck after their upgrades.
And there is a direct canon line from Moriarty through to the EMH and later sentient holograms via Lt. Barclay.
Turns out the Star Trek predicted 2020's style AI behaviour rather well. Considering nuclear war is then due in 2026, that's disconcerting.