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From: reynolds@syd.dit.CSIRO.AU (Chris.Reynolds)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: The Turing Test is no good!
Keywords: Turing, Intelligence
Message-ID: <1990Aug16.234419.24210@syd.dit.CSIRO.AU>
Date: 16 Aug 90 23:44:19 GMT
References: <2870@bruce.cs.monash.OZ.AU> <3211@gara.une.oz.au> <36163@ut-emx.UUCP>
Sender: reynolds@syd.dit.csiro.au (Chris Reynolds)
Distribution: comp
Organization: CSIRO Division of Info Tech, Sydney, Australia
Lines: 27

>  Can anyone out there suggest further basic criteria of intelligence?  The only
>  other things I can think of at the moment involve the machine's ability to
>  judge when it is and when it is not appropriate to apply creative means in
>  its thought processes.  Other possibilites would seem to be limited to
>  criteria applied to the knowledge-base, but I'm not sure what nature
>  such would take.
      
Surely intelligence, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder, and any 
attempt to get a single unambigious definition is about as fruitless as the 
medieval alchemists trying to find the philosopher's stone. 

Intelligence represents little more than a measure of position in the pecking-
order of success in the society subgroup in which it is observed. If you are 
an academic working on artificial intelligence research, a profound 
knowledge of philosophy or formal mathematics will increase your 
intelligence as seen by your colleagues - which will be even higher if you 
combine both attributes. However most A.I. researchers would have 
considerable survival problems if they suddenly found themselves, for 
example, on their own, miles from anywhere, in the Australian outback.

May I suggest that a useful common factor of inteligence (in as far as there 
can be one shared by Western academics, Buddist monks, and tribes from 
the Brazilian jungle) is the ability to cope with ignorance - i.e. the ability to 
rapidly adapt behaviour to met, and possibly exploit, unanticipated features 
of the perceived environment.

Chris Reynolds