Most ICAI programs in use today operate in a set sequence: presentation of new material, evaluation of student response, and employment of tutorial material (if necessary). However, researchers at Yale University have created software that uses a more Socratic way of teaching. These programs encourage discovery and often will not respond directly to a student's questions about a specific topic. The basic premise of this type of computer-assisted learning is to present new material only when a student needs it. This is when the brain is most ready to accept and retain the information. This is exactly the scenario most teachers hope for: students who become adroit self-educators, enthusiastically seeking the wisdom and truth that is meaningful to them.

AI has definitely produced new and useful things, but it can be argued that it has never produced an idea. However, AI can certainly support human creativity, producing patterns from large amounts of data as well as helping us transcend the boundaries of our knowledge traditions.

A popular metaphor used to describe this is the relationship between the horse and the car. When the original creators dreamed up the first automobile, they did not attempt to replicate the muscles, joints, and metabolism of a horse; they used an internal combustion engine instead, and put it on wheels

ANNs learn from a large number of learning examples how to reproduce their statistical frequency.

t all human problem-solving could be represented as a manipulation of symbols