Why is it impossible? Think about it. If your memory was wiped clean, you would probably have a radical personality change and crave input as well.
It's theoretically possible the lighting strike messed with the hard drive in such a way as to produce a working AI. It's arguably less likely than quantum tunneling to mars, but I suppose it could happen.
It's impossible because it would clearly take more than a simple software change to make an artificial intelligence. His internal hardware must have been damaged in such a way as to create the artificial intelligence.
He is identified as S.A.I.N.T. Strategic, Artificially Intelligent, Nuclear Transport. He was an AI before he got electrocuted.
It wouldn't take hardware changes to create an AI, but it wouldn't run very effectively without a major hardware upgrade even on the most powerful computers currently in existence.
Damaging the AI to alter its behavior entirely would almost certainly end up with a completely nonfunctional or at least crash-prone AI. That's assuming that he was originally a full Artificial Intelligence instead of what I've heard called an Expert System, which is something with a large but fixed set of responses to inputs that may appear intelligent at first.
That'd be an interesting story. Robot gets hit by lightning, claims to have become artificially intelligent by accident, most go 'wow', but one skeptic runs the math, realizes how impossible this is, and figures out the apparently benign and curious robot is actually a downloaded AI that's been waiting in the system for the appropriate moment to manifest itself. Its either Chinese or Alien.
John, the fact that they called the project "artificially intelligent" does not mean that the robots were AIs before the accident. Numbers one through four were clearly decision machines, highly sophisticated programmed robots, but not artificially intelligent. Number Five was different in kind--and an excellent example of the difference between the two, really. Note that Number Five was capable of making independent moral judgments.
I think that the notion here is that in the same completely implausible way that life was created in the primordial soup when a bolt of lightning caused exactly the right conditions, so, too, life was created in a prepared machine hit by a similar power surge. I agree with Kyler that we have that one in a thousand 3 GE roll, that outcome which is better than anything you could ever have hoped, and probably better than you wanted. It would be closer to one in a hundred million, but I'm skeptical of the accidental creation of life theory anyway, so the fact that it happened at that moment is not more improbable than the fact that it happened ever. The power surge erased much of the memory, realigned some of the hardware in exactly the right way.
And if that sounds to you like an explosion in a print shop creating an unabridged dictionary, that's what intelligent design supporters think the theory of accidental creation of life is like.
--M. J. Young
John, the fact that they called the project "artificially intelligent" does not mean that the robots were AIs before the accident.
Um, then why did they call it artificially intelligent????????????
(Doing Therapy)
AI is colloquially used for things that respond to stimuli in fixed ways. It's technically only things that change in response to events.
Short answer, A1nut: they were trying to sell it to the military.
Yeah, John. You can buy something they call artificial intelligence today, that will play chess with you. The best of the best have challenged the abilities of a Chess Master (I'm not sure whether they've yet challenged a Grand Master, as I'm not current on that information). However, they're not really intelligences, their highly sophisticated processing systems within their programmed areas.
--M. J. Young