Back in the day, when normal people hadn't been exposed to these things (let alone understand them), there was a strong tendency for people to ascribe intelligence to them. Making that sort of mistake really is a strong human tendency that has to be guarded against.

People see something behaving based on some very simple rules and assume that it is “thinking”.

This is just repeating what you said before, but who are these 'people' that you're talking about?

Me. I am one of the people mentioned.

I haphazardly ascribe intelligence to too many things.

Well it's distilled thinking, isn't it?

Someone had to come up with the heuristics and then baked it into rigid rules. For the outside observer it's impossible to tell if it's baked or if it's being intelligently decided on the fly.

> Double AA

So you mean AAAA?

I actually remember those things taking two AA batteries, so I may have flubbed my way into something that is still technically true.