What Is Intelligence?

That was the discussion started in my class and to get the conversation started, they added following answers by some great AI researchers.

Dr. Boyang 'Albert' Li provided this link to Pei Wang's paper.  Dr. Li summarized Wang's position in the paper with this quote from the paper:

"Intelligence is the capacity of a system to adapt to its environment while operating with insufficient knowledge and resources."

I also asked Dr. Li to give a personal definition, which he kindly did.  I note that he adds that, for intelligence in general, Wang's remains the best definition.  Here was Li's personal definition:

"My personal definition is probably more like solving difficult problems, or do what humans can do, since these are immediate goals for computational narrative intelligence."

Dr. Michael Helms provided this definition:

"Intelligence is that which we ascribe to a system, for an observed set of system actions under sufficiently varied stochastic conditions, and within a sufficiently complex domain, such that those actions can be interpreted to facilitate the optimization of a self-consistent utility function, taking into account limitations of the systems knowledge and its capability to act, for some definition of sufficiently varied and sufficiently complex that are features of the observer, and not the observed."

Dr. Ashok Goel gave this very thoughtful response:

"What is intelligence? Doesnt that depends on what the meaning of "is" is? Seriously, the question assumes, as do most definitions of intelligence, that there *is* some thing, one specific thing, called intelligence. But what if, like life, like love, intelligence is no one thing with clear boundaries? What if it is just a word we use to denote a complex and intricate ensemble with unclear boundaries that we

do not yet understand? What if once we came to understand intelligence, the question would not make much sense anymore?"

Dr. Swaroop Vattam gave this answer:

"Asking AI researchers what intelligence is is akin to asking a life-sciences researcher what life is. Biology has made a lot of progress without pinning down the definition of life. I think it's the same way for us folks."

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I had never thought about this question very clearly and I started tried to define intelligence for the first time and here's my response:

In sprint of this exceptionally interesting class, I would like to add some basic constraints (or representations) for fun before attempting to construct the meaning of intelligence (i.e., if there is meaning):

• I would shed the anthropomorphic view and clearly, include every species on this planet to be considered for evaluation. This finding "Squirrels and chipmunks eavesdrop on birds, sometimes adding their own thoughts." which came out this week is a prime example of our limits of knowledge and begs for our epistemological modesty.
• Intelligence and Wisdom are probably different. The line between them is very blurry and sometimes overlaps but outside of those blurriness both are different entities.
• If something that clearly falls under the realm of intelligence wouldn't automatically exclude itself just because we decided linguistically to add "Artificial" in front of it to make us comfortable or something of that sort. This one could be distributed cognition and similar to ants, eusocial theory of evolution.
• Finally, I wouldn't group intelligence at species level but at an individual level in each species. I think, grouping at species level is one of the crucial reasons we tend anthropomorphize. Asperger's syndrome is one of the clear indicators of this phenomena. Under this criteria, capacity for future intelligence will be in a completely different domain and should not be confused with an entity which has already displayed its intelligence.
• To stress the above point, mastering existing knowledge is not the same as creating new knowledge. As Peter Thiel points out in Zero to One - "Doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But every time we create something new, we go from 0 to 1. The act of creation is "singular", as is the moment of creation, and the result is something fresh and strange."

Drawing from above highly simplified representations and the ideas summarized eloquently in E.O.Wilson's Consilience:Unity of Knowledge, the closet definition of intelligence I can think of is:

An entity can be considered intelligence if it has used it's existing knowledge repository to create or discover new knowledge which was previously unknown to it and does so in a stochastic environment.