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From: peru@soleil.UUCP (Dave Peru)
Newsgroups: comp.ai,talk.philosophy.misc
Subject: RE: Artificial Intelligence and Intelligence
Message-ID: <552@soleil.UUCP>
Date: 3 Jan 89 20:27:41 GMT
Organization: Harris Semiconductor, Somerville, NJ
Lines: 36

"But essential abilities for intelligence are certainly:

     to respond to situations very flexibly;
     to take advantage of fortuitous circumstances;
     to make sense out of ambiguous or contradictory messages;
     to recognize the relative importance of different elements of a situation;
     to find similarities between situations despite differences which may
          separate them;
     to draw distinctions between situations despite similarities which may
          link them;
     to synthesize new concepts by taking old concepts and putting them
          together in new ways;
     to come up with ideas with are novel.

 Here one runs up against a seeming paradox.  Computers by their very nature
 are the most inflexible, desireless, rule-following of beasts.  Fast though
 they may be, they are nonetheless the epitome of unconsciousness.  How, then,
 can intelligent behavior be programmed?  Isn't this the most blatent of
 contradictions in terms?  One of the major theses os this book is that it is
 not a contradiction at all.  One of the major purposes of this book is to urge
 each reader to confront the apparent contradiction head on, to savor it, to
 turn it over, to take it apart, to wallow in it, so that in the end the reader
 might emerge with new insights into the seemingly unbreachable gulf between 
 the formal and the informal, the animate and the inanimate, the flexible and
 the inflexible.

 This is what Artificial Intelligence (AI) research is all about.  And the 
 strange flavor of AI work is that people try to put together long sets of
 rules in strict formalisms which tell inflexible machines how to be flexible."

Taken from p.26 of "Goedel, Escher, Bach..." by D.R. Hofstadter.

Does anyone disagree with this?

Does anyone strongly disagree if I include in the definition of "intelligence"
the ability to recognize a paradox?