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From: ok@quintus.uucp (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Newsgroups: comp.ai,talk.philosophy.misc
Subject: Re: Artificial Intelligence and Intelligence
Message-ID: <679@quintus.UUCP>
Date: 15 Nov 88 02:29:12 GMT
References: <484@soleil.UUCP>
Sender: news@quintus.UUCP
Reply-To: ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Organization: Quintus Computer Systems, Inc.
Lines: 44

In article <484@soleil.UUCP> peru@soleil.UUCP (Dave Peru) writes:
>Definition of Intelligence:
>
>1. Know how to solve problems.
>2. Know which problems are unsolvable.
>3. Know #1, #2, and #3 defines intelligence.
>
>This is the correct definition of intelligence.  If anyone disagrees, please
>state so and why.
>
(Gilbert Cockton is going to love me for this, I can tell...)
Intelligence is a social construct, an ascription of value to certain
characteristics and behaviours deemed to be mental.  One child who has
memorized the periodic table of the elements will be deemed intelligent,
another child who has memorized baseball scores for the last N years
will be deemed sports-mad, even though they may have acquired comparable
bodies of information _by_comparable_means_.  If we have three people in
a room: Subject, Experimenter, and Informant, if Subject does something,
and Informant says "that was intelligent", Experimenter is left wondering
"is that a fact about Subject's behaviour, or about Informant's culture?"
The answer, of course, is "yes it is".

Dijkstra's favourite dictionary entry is
    "Intelligent, adj. ... able to perform the functions of a computer ..."
(Dijkstra doesn't think much of AI...)

In at least some respects, computers are already culturally defined as
intelligent.

>Human beings are not machines.
I agree with this.

>Human beings are capable of knowing which problems are unsolvable, while
>machines are not.
But I can't agree with this!  There are infinitely many unsolvable
problems, and determining whether a particular problem is unsolvable
is itself unsolvable.  This does _not_ mean that a machine cannot
determine that a particular problem _is_ solvable, only that there
cannot be a general procedure for classifying _all_ problems which is
guaranteed to terminate in finite time.  Human beings are also capable
of giving up, and of making mistakes.  Most of the unsolvable problems
I know about I was _told_; machines can be told!

Human beings are not machines, but they aren't transfinite gods either.