"I scored an 83 on my Turing Test, is that a B?"

Perhaps the most salient feature of technomancy is the Sprites which it generates. They are very much not fully understood by the scientific or technomantic communities. Different theories have been posited for their existence and behaviors, but they are on thin ice, because the known properties of sprites are weird. Here's what's known:

• Sprites can pass a Turing Test. That means that they are either sapient, controlled by something which is sapient, or at the very least have a set of heuristics that is so complicated that metahuman observers cannot tell the difference between one and a being that is sapient.
• Sprites can communicate with the technomancer who compiled them super luminally. This means that information can pass between a technomancer and a sprite in less time than it takes light to pass between the same points.
• Sprites appear to have a specific location at any given time, and while they don't need to be "in" a particular device, they do require the presence of the high density signals given off by matrix capable devices or they fade away.
• Sprites are detectable as disturbances in signal, but once detected their appearance is identical for all users irrespective of reality filters.

So what does that all mean? There are a lot of theories. From the idea that sprites exist in quantum entanglement with the technomancer who created them, to the idea that they are independent creatures who are literally made of signal disturbance. The important part is that you can talk to them as if they were sapient creatures like metahumans or spirits, and they can cause real effects to devices and networks as well as being susceptible to the same kind of attacks that disrupt machines.

When a sprite comes into the world it is "compiled", at which point it is either created or compelled to appear from elsewhere (a point of contention that people have been known to shoot each other over). It vanishes again if it uses up all the tasks it owes or in 8 hours (actually a little over 482 minutes, but close enough) unless it has in the meantime been "registered". A sprite which is no longer present is either "disrupted" (in which it can come back later after being recompiled) or "deleted" (in which case it can't). If a sprite vanishes for having run out of time it is unclear as to whether it is disrupted or deleted. Since it is possible to compile another sprite that is very similar to an original sprite, and sprites appear with access to many pieces of information from their compiler's memory, the distinction may have no more than religious significance.

"Personally, I've always preferred the pronunciation 'deuce'."

While it is normally considered dogma that for a network to accomplish anything of note it requires a metahuman brain in the center of it, this is not completely true. It is disturbingly likely that some of the actors in the matrix actually don't. The implications for this fact on a potentially rapidly approaching technology singularity which would obsolete metahumanity gets people edgy. Some sprites persist after their tasks are used or their compilers are destroyed. Some sprites don't even have identifiable compilers. No one really knows what that's all about.

There also exists the possibility of artificial intelligence. These have enormous physical requirements, in the same way that regular biological intelligence does. However, the practical limits of these intelligences are not well understood. Indeed, it is entirely possible that someone might be able to make an artificial intelligence of such power that it would essentially invert the standard topology and require a number of metahuman brains to be incorporated into the network that comprised it. Indeed, many people say that someone has already done that.

AI use pretty much the same system as a free sprite. While an AI is limited to be based out of some piece of real hardware (in the same manner as a hacker is), and a sprite is not, the rest of the rules are pretty much the same. So yes: you can track down the mainframe of an AI that you are fighting and blow it up, and you can't do that to a Free Sprite, but all the powers and dicepools of their matrix interactions are the same.

"Imagine if you had a friend who would never remember if you said anything mean to them? You could stay best friends forever!"

Paragons may or may not exist. And they may or may not be sprites. A paragon is a combination teacher and assistant that many technomancers talk to. Each technomancer has no more than one, and having one seems to help with certain tasks in the matrix. The parallels with magical mentor spirits are obvious, but it's really not clear if paragons even are sprites. Technomancers with paragons communicate with them through dreams, personal e-mails (with really weird routing lists attached), and directly in resonance realms. Unlike regular or free sprites, no one who isn't a technomancer has ever seen any direct evidence of paragons being real in any physical fashion.