Caching: The storing of frequently used data in extremely fast RAM that connects directly to CPU.

Virtual memory: Used to temporarily store data and swap it in and out of RAM.

Motherboard: This is main board in computer that has processor, RAM, BIOS ROM, timing and control, interrupt and direct memory access hardware and keyboard interface on it which are connected to it through secondary connection.

Soundcard: this device attaches to motherboard with a socket called PCI, which allows computer to play CD's or music files, or MP3 CD's. All soundcards have speakers and connectors. The quality of sound depends upon quality of card.

Hard drive: This is main storage device of a computer. It stores information including OS that allows you to access it all. Most common OS for PCs is Microsoft Windows. And Apple computers use Macintosh operating system.

Other drives: Most computers are also complete with floppy disk and CD drives. These vary from system to system, however all work in same way. They read information stored on disks. These are necessary for maintaining and updating computer's software and operating system.

That's components that create average computer. Although there are many different systems, and configura- tions, it is difficult to imagine our lives without them.

Roger A. Pendey is founder of All About Computers an excellent resource site dedicated to information about computers.

The Turing Test is a measure of Artificial Intelligence that was created by Alan Turing. He stated that question of whether or not machines could think was too vague, and proposed a test that was more specific. His test, without going into too much detail, involved trying to get a computer to fool people into believing that it was human. The people would type a question into a console and receive a response from computer on other side. While there has been much work done on systems trying to pass Turing test, none of them have succeeded yet. There has also been research done into creating machines that can exhibit emotions. However, we're still a long way off from seeing a machine that can appear to be alive.

The early excitement over AI led to developers trying to create a generic reasoning problem solver that could search through a mass of knowledge that it has acquired and find solutions to any problem that was thrown at it. Unfortunately this proved almost impossible in practice. Today's AI tends to focus on very specific problems and knowledge areas. Expert Systems are programs that are "Experts" in a specific field and can answer queries related to only that field. Their applications include medical diagnosis, credit card application, and other fields where data is to be analyzed.

I haven't even begun to explore true extent of AI in this article, but maybe I've piqued your interest. If you want to look into it further, try reading Wikipedia (free on-line encyclopedia) entry and maybe downloading something like Prolog to have a go and see what real AI is like. I find it quite interesting because it involves a similar mindset to programming as you attempt to break a problem down enough for a computer to understand it, but of course actual implementation is very different.

Here's a fun thing to try. Open a copy of ALICE (http://www.alicebot.org/), start a conversation with a friend on your messenger program of choice, feed their responses into ALICE and send program's responses back. See how long it takes before they either work out what's happening or get annoyed and block you (which has been most common result of my experimentations). Enjoy your exploration of world of artificial intelligence.