This Q&A is part of a weekly series of posts highlighting common questions encountered by technophiles and answered by users at Stack Exchange, a free, community-powered network of 100+ Q&A sites.

While there have been many sober warnings about AI and recursive self-improvement, Arianna Huffington argues that it is a fundamentally human skill.

In the real world you will almost never use recursion. You'll use loops with known bounds because the worst case for everything will be known and controlled. There are a handful of guys working in ...