Richard, I long ago proposed a working definition of intelligence as
"Achieving complex goals in complex environments." I then went
through a bunch of trouble to precisely define all the component
terms of that definition; you can consult the Appendix to my 2006
book "The Hidden Pattern".... Shane Legg and Marcus Hutter
have proposed a related definition of intelligence in a recent paper...
Anyone can propose a definition. The point of my objection is that a
definition has to have some way to be compared against reality.
Suppose I define intelligence to be:
"A funtion that maps goals G and world states W onto action states A,
where G, W and A are any mathematical entities whatsoever."
That would make any function that maps X [cross] Y into Z an
"intelligence".
Such a definition would be pointless. The question is *why* would it
be pointless? What criteria are applied, in order to determine
whether the definition has something to the thing that in everyday
life we call intelligence.
The difficulty in comparing my definition against reality is that my
definition defines intelligence relative to a "complexity" measure.
For this reason, it is fundamentally a subjective definition of
intelligence, except in the unrealistic case where "degree of complexity
tends to infinity" (in which case all "reasonably general" complexity
measures become equivalent, due to bisimulation of Turing machines).
To qualitatively compare my definition to the "everyday life" definition
of intelligence, we can check its consistency with our everyday life
definition of "complexity." Informally, at least, my definition seems
to check out to me: intelligence according to an IQ test does seem to
have something to do with the ability to achieve complex goals; and, the
reason we think IQ tests mean anything is that we think the ability to
achieve complex goals in the test-context will correlate with the
ability to achieve complex goals in various more complex environments
(contexts).
Anyway, if I accept for instance **Richard Loosemore** as a measurer of
the complexity of environments and goals, then relative to
Richard-as-a-complexity-measure, I can assess the intelligence of
various entities, using my definition....
In practice, in building a system like Novamente, I'm relying on modern
human culture's "consensus complexity measure" and trying to make a
system that, according to this measure, can achieve a diverse variety of
complex goals in complex situations...
P.S. Quick sanity check: you know the last comment in the quote you
gave (about loking in the dictionary) was Matt's, not mine, right?
Yes...
Ben
-----
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/?list_id=11983
