Mike Tintner wrote:
You guys are driving me nuts.

Jumping in at the middle, here goes:

"Intelligence is the capacity to solve problems.
(An intelligent agent solves problems in order to reach its goals)
Problems occur when an agent must select between two or more paths to reach its goals.

Sorry to hear it's driving you nuts, but....

Jumping in at the middle means you missed the original point, unfortunately: the original point is whether you can do build a definition without begging any questions, and the terms 'solve', 'problem', 'agent' and 'goal' in the above definition all require definitions of their own.

When you really push hard on it, it turns out that these terms cannot be defined without implicitly leaving it up to an 'intelligence' (i.e. us) to make a judgment call about what constitutes 'solve', 'problem', 'agent' and 'goal'.

Try it: what counts as a 'goal'? If I drop this pencil, does it have the 'goal' of reaching the floor? If 'goal' is the wrong word here (and clearly it is), then what exactly is a real goal?

You may have to go back to the beginning of the thread and read exactly what I was arguing, to know why I said what I did a few hours ago.

Why is it important?  Well, I did say why, too..... :-)


Eric B. Ramsay wrote:
> Several emails ago, both Ben and Richard said they were no longer going
> to continue this argument, yet here they are - still arguing. Will the
> definition of intelligence be able to accomodate this behavior by these
> gentlemen?

Well...... actually I said "Unless you or someone else comes up with a definition that does not fall into one of these traps, I am not going to waste any more time arguing the point."

But Ben did try to come up with one, so I continued.

Okay, so at a meta level it was brainless of me to continue ;-)




Richard Loosemore.

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