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Article 6454 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: bill@nsma.arizona.edu (Bill Skaggs)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Defining intelligence
Message-ID: <BILL.92Jul14224037@ca3.nsma.arizona.edu>
Date: 15 Jul 92 05:40:37 GMT
References: <1992Jul8.092458.3088@otago.ac.nz> <1992Jul15.013626.24984@dcs.qmw.ac.uk>
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Organization: ARL Division of Neural Systems, Memory and Aging, University of
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In-Reply-To: abreu@dcs.qmw.ac.uk's message of 15 Jul 92 01: 36:26 GMT

abreu@dcs.qmw.ac.uk (Abreu) writes:


   I'd say that the ability to solve problems is a RESULT of intelligence,
   and certainly that there's more to intelligence than logic. If we look
   at human production in the fields of literature, art, music, (you get
   the picture) I think we'd all agree that they require intelligence, but
   they're not exactly what we'd call problem-solving.

The goal, in, say, writing a novel, is to produce *something of
value*.  Since the space of novel-length word sequences is enormous,
and the subset of high value is relatively small, producing a good
novel is a search problem of formidable proportions.  Finding a
solution demonstrates a great deal of intelligence.

   Now, few spaces could be more restricted than game-playing,
   and even with state-of-the-art hardware (although Von-Neuman archite-
   ctures), state-of-the-art tree searching algorithms heavily optimised
   for performance, table-based evaluation functions, all kinds of
   heuristical knowledge that can be integrated into such systems, we still
   can't beat the best human players.

So far, the standard approach to designing a game-playing machine is
to do a lot of search and a little bit of pruning.  Humans cannot
search as rapidly as fast computers, but humans use far more
sophisticated pruning strategies.  At the moment, for many games the
tradeoff still favors humans, but sooner or later this will change.

    > Understanding the nature of human intelligence means understanding the
    > kinds of problems we are capable of solving and the strategies we use
    > to solve them.  The same applies to alien intelligence, or for that
    > matter to artificial intelligence.

   Debatable, in the least! I don't mean to say that problem solving is
   negligible to a definition of intelligence; maybe it does have a relevant
   part to play. I do mean to say, though, that there must be much more to
   intelligence than problem-solving. Our knowledge of the parallel processes
   occuring in the brain is still very, very limited. [ . . . ]

I don't think it's useful to identify intelligence with everything
that's happening in the brain.  Most people are comfortable speaking
about a dog or a bear as having behaved intelligently in certain
circumstances.  The common element in those circumstances, it seems to
me, is that the animal has solved a difficult problem.  We don't know
what's happening in the animal's brain when it solves the problem, and
it doesn't really matter.

	-- Bill


