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From: BATALI%MIT-OZ@MIT-MC.ARPA
Newsgroups: net.ai
Subject: Inscrutable Intelligence
Message-ID: <13337@sri-arpa.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 3-Nov-83 19:29:00 EST
Article-I.D.: sri-arpa.13337
Posted: Thu Nov  3 19:29:00 1983
Date-Received: Mon, 7-Nov-83 09:07:33 EST
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nd it will lead to calling all sorts of
    partial things "intelligence".

If the account is partial and incomplete, and leads to calling partial
things intelligence, then the account must be improved or rejected.
I'm not claiming that an account must be short, just that we need
one.

    The kinds of accounts to confirm
    are things like partial theories that need their own names, like

       heuristic search method
       credit-assignment scheme
       knowledge-representation scheme, etc.


But why are these thing interesting?  Why is heuristic search better
than "blind" search?  Why need we assign credit?  Etc?  My answer:
because such things are the "right" thing to do for a program to be
intelligent.  This answer appeals to a pre-theoretic conception of
what intelligence is.   A more precise notion would help us
assess the relevance of these and other methods to AI.

One potential reason to make a more precise "definition" of
intelligence is that such a definition might actually be useful in
making a program intelligent.  If we could say "do that" to a program
while pointing to the definition, and if it "did that", we would have
an intelligent program.  But I am far too optimistic.  (Perhaps
"childishly" so).