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I got thinking about this from The Brain as an interface to the Spirit . My understanding of a neural network, as described by Tres and John, is that it is different from a computer in having information distributed in many locations. A neuron can be linked to 1000 other neurons, and the strength of those links can be highly variable.
This suggested to me the linking of human beings, specifically the children in battle school and how the bridge that became Jane started out as the computer games designed to evaluate them psychologically and for organizational behavior. It seems the bridge also had the ability to analyze other programs if there were more suitable, such as with Bean hacking the station computer.
It would seem likely that this bridge computer also would be involved in reccomending where in tactical school the children should go next. As we know, it turned out to have the ability to interface with computers on earth to get information such as the picture of Peter that shows up in Ender's Game.
And it was implied, to me at least, in Ender's Shadow that Bean's father was the designer of the bridge.
I think, in a way, that Ender's play of the game may have pushed the program into something the Hive Queen could find. It also may have happened with the program being assigned to analyze Bean's non-fantasy activities. I guess I would want to go back and read these two books with these questions in mind.
There is a belief that the technology we have, no matter how fast or large we make it, is fundamentally different from neural material and so unable to produce self-aware A.I. Sure one could posit that other technology comes into play between now and when Ender's Game was set, but if that were the case, Jane wouldn't be one of a kind.
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