Pei, necessary to spend some time on this issue, since the definition of
intelligence one accepts directly determines one's research goal and criteria in evaluating other people's work. Nobody can do or even talk about AI or AGI without an idea about what it means.
This is exactly why I am interested in the definition of intelligence. I think the topic deserves far more time and thought in AI than it currently gets. Based on the above general consideration, I define "intelligence" as
"the ability to adapt and work with insufficient knowledge and resources"
According to my definition, a thermostat is not intelligence, and nor is an algorithm that provide "optimum" solutions by going through all possibilities and pick the best.
If an optimisation algorithm searches some of a solution space (because of lack of computer power to search all of it) and then returns a solution, does this system have some intelligence according to your definition? Most optimisation algorithms have simple adaption (let's say that it's a genetic algorithm to make things concrete), and the system has insufficient knowledge and resources to directly search the whole space. To criticize his assumption as "too far away from reality" is a
different matter, which is also why I don't agree with Hutter and Legg. Formal systems can be built on different assumptions, some of which are closer to reality than some others.
Both AIXI and universal intelligence are too far away from reality to be directly implemented. I think we all agree on that. In their current form their main use is for theoretical study. In the case of AIXI, it seems to me that it would be difficult to build something that approximates these ideas in a way that produced a real working AI system. Or maybe I'm just not smart enough to see how it would be done. In the case of universal intelligence I think there is some hope due to the fact that the C-Test is based on quite similar ideas and this has been used to construct an intelligence test with sensible results. Sometime after my thesis I'm going to code up an intelligence test based on universal intelligence and see how well various AI algorithms perform. Cheers Shane ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=231415&user_secret=fabd7936
