When I was a computer science student almost thirty years ago, I learned about recursion. I am wondering if a certain recursive function or algorithm could cause an AI to fall into an infinite loop, which in some undefined way (because I'm not an expert in this) could cause the AI to either develop its capacities at a crazy speed, or its control over other, related systems.

Something is recursive if it:

a) has a base case, like one's parent, and

b) has a recursive step, like one's parent's ancestor, this reducing all cases to the base case

I guess I'm vaguely asking if there is a function that could be fed to an AI that would make it "go crazy," like gnu = gnu not unix, etc. etc.