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From: MINSKY%MIT-OZ@MIT-MC.ARPA
Newsgroups: net.ai
Subject: Inscrutable Intelligence
Message-ID: <13335@sri-arpa.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 3-Nov-83 16:42:00 EST
Article-I.D.: sri-arpa.13335
Posted: Thu Nov  3 16:42:00 1983
Date-Received: Mon, 7-Nov-83 09:02:11 EST
Lines: 27


Sure.  I agree you want an account of what intelligence is "about".
When I complained about making a "definition" I meant
one of those useless compact thingies in dictionaries.

But I don't agree that you need this for scientific motivation.
Batali: do you really think Biologists need definitions of Life
for such purposes?

Finally, I simply don't think this is a compact phenomenon.
Any such "account", if brief, will be very partial and incomplete.
To expect a test to show that "the account is correct" depends
on the nature of the partial theory.  In a nutshell, I still
don't see any use at all for
such definition, and it will lead to calling all sorts of
partial things "intelligence".  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.

As in biology, we simply are much too far along to be so childish as
to say "this program is intelligent" and "this one is not".  How often
do you see a biologist do an experiment and then announce "See, this
is the secret of Life".  No.  He says, "this shows that enzyme
FOO is involved in degrading substrate BAR".