This thread has diverged a bit, but going back to the original topic, here's my 10c for today.
Trying to "define intelligence" is in my opinion a waste of time. I read a great essay about flight recently where they talked about the concept of what flight is. There were a lot of people around before planes who thought that flying machines were impossible. It was the standard educated opinion of the time and there was one skeptic in particular who was very outspoken (I can't remember his name but can look it up for anybody who wants it). Anyway, so along came flying machines and people were flying around in the sky for hours at a time. Nevertheless the above mentioned skeptic refused to call what the "flying machines" did, "flying". It was, in his opinion, something quite different to what birds did. Whose to say what intelligence *really* is. My approach is simply to try to define something that captures with precision aspects of the fuzzy concept of intelligence, name it something else, and then get on with the job. If nobody/everybody thinks that what I have defined has the same meaning as the natural language concept of intelligence it doesn't make any difference. My word of choice is cybernance (technically the word makes sense though things cyber- are getting a bit much). I defined it in terms of algorithmic information theory but later discovered that I'd been beaten to it by somebody else so never published my ideas. (If you take the k=1 case in Marcus Hutter's "intelligence order relation" that's what I had in mind - he goes on to prove all sorts of interesting and powerful results) So even if you don't think that this is really "intelligence" you would still have to agree that it's a very powerful concept --- which is good enough for me. Shane __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Everything you'll ever need on one web page from News and Sport to Email and Music Charts http://uk.my.yahoo.com ------- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/
