It seems to me that the mind is just a generator of random ideas based on things experienced recently, where the ideas are checked in various layers for how much sense they make and passed to the conscious mind when they have already passed some filters. In essence, our thinking process is a combination of semi-random idea generation and tweaking, combined with validation and testing.

There seems to be no reason why the same could not be implemented in a machine. People who argue that machines cannot do random stuff have apparently never dealt with cryptography.