Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!uccba!uceng!dmocsny
From: dmocsny@uceng.UC.EDU (daniel mocsny)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Turing Test and Subject Bias
Summary: Deciding what the system can do
Keywords: Intelligence, Ideas, Problem Solving, Thinking
Message-ID: <1415@uceng.UC.EDU>
Date: 7 Jul 89 01:47:45 GMT
References: <3039@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk> <1174@cbnewsh.ATT.COM> <58052@linus.UUCP>
Organization: Univ. of Cincinnati, College of Engg.
Lines: 54

In article <58052@linus.UUCP>, bwk@mbunix.mitre.org (Barry W. Kort) writes:
> In article <3118@crete.cs.glasgow.ac.uk> gilbert@cs.glasgow.ac.uk
> (Gilbert Cockton) writes:
>  > Wow, that's tight!  What if I can only solve some of your problems?
>  > What if I'm brilliant at some, and moderate at others?
> 
> Then you have a mixed score on the intelligence vector.

I almost wish we did not have one word "intelligence." Just as the
Greeks had three words for what we call "love," one word can't contain
everything that jams into the concept of what minds do.

Consider the far simpler problem of characterizing the performance of
a computer system. If I take two comparable workstations, one built
around an Intel 80386 and the other containing a Moto 68030, and I ask
the simple question: "Which system is more powerful?" The answer is
another question: "At what task?" Until we know how to unambiguously
characterize our artifacts, we can hardly get a handle on ourselves.

To accurately benchmark a computer system, you need some quantitative
expression that contains terms accounting for the performance of every
subsystem constituting the system. Then you need to be able to express
exactly how a particular task makes demands on those subsystems. I
don't see any obvious way to make this procedure any simpler than just
running the task on the target system and watching the wall clock.

>  > I'd love to staff a MacDonald's for a day completely with MENSA types
>  > to see how their IQ scores prepared them for all the problems of
>  > fast-food service :-)
> 
> I wonder if they would do better than Hamburger Helpers staffing
> our universities and think tanks.

Whenever we have a group of people involved in some competitive
environment with some fairly solid performance metric (e.g., getting
through engineering school, learning to fly combat aircraft, playing a
musical instrument), we find that their scores usually describe
something like a normal distribution. People responsible for managing
large enterprises obviously want to have some way to predict
individual performance in whatever skills they demand. How convenient
if this predictor were to be a scalar as easy to discuss as
"intelligence." However, actual performance is the only valid test, as
no artificial testing procedure can accurately account for all the
factors.

We don't yet have much of an idea how given real-world problems make
demands on our wetware. If we did, we might be able to isolate our
brains' subsystems, attempt to characterize their performances, and
then try to draw some conclusions about how well the parts might work
together. But this seems absurdly beyond what we can meaningfully
discuss just now.

Dan Mocsny
dmocsny@uceng.uc.edu