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From: unbent@ecsvax.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.ai
Subject: Inscrutable Intelligence
Message-ID: <1488@ecsvax.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 7-Nov-83 10:17:05 EST
Article-I.D.: ecsvax.1488
Posted: Mon Nov  7 10:17:05 1983
Date-Received: Tue, 8-Nov-83 12:48:40 EST
Lines: 28

I sympathize with the longing for an "operational definition" of
'intelligence'--especially since you've got to write *something* on
grant applications to justify all those hardware costs.  (That's not a
problem we philosophers have.  Sigh!)  But I don't see any reason to
suppose that you're ever going to *get* one, nor, in the end, that you
really *need* one.

You're probably not going to get one because "intelligence" is
one of those "open textury", "clustery" kinds of notions.  That is,
we know it when we see it (most of the time), but there are no necessary and
sufficient conditions that one can give in advance which instances of it
must satisfy.  (This isn't an uncommon phenomenon.  As my colleague Paul Ziff
once pointed out, when we say "A cheetah can outrun a man", we can recognize
that races between men and *lame* cheetahs, *hobbled* cheetahs, *three-legged*
cheetahs, cheetahs *running on ice*, etc. don't count as counterexamples to the
claim even if the man wins--when such cases are brought up.  But we can't give
an exhaustive list of spurious counterexamples *in advance*.)

Why not rest content with saying that the object of the game is to get
computers to be able to do some of the things that *we* can do--e.g.,
recognize patterns, get a high score on the Miller Analogies Test,
carry on an interesting conversation?  What one would like to say, I
know, is "do some of the things we do *the way we do them*--but the
problem there is that we have no very good idea *how* we do them.  Maybe
if we can get a computer to do some of them, we'll get some ideas about
us--although I'm skeptical about that, too.

                        --Jay Rosenberg (ecsvax!unbent)