Not in the slightest.

But now your definition gets hazy. You propose ranking intelligence based on "how quantitatively and qualitatively a being organizes data", without elaboration. Clearly the numbers in a sorted list are "more organized" than the words in a poem. Doesn't this make bubble sort more intelligent by your definition? If not, how does one score, on your one-dimensional scale, how a being organizes data?

Quote:Original post by owl
I meant quality in a human sense. A poem expresing a human idea (with methaphors, paraboles, reminicenses), would be of higher quality than a bunch of sorted numbers.

Then this just comes down to the bog-standard definition, "thinks like us".

Not offhand. But you should be aware that that's the real definition you're using, none of this "organizes information" silliness. Justice Potter Stewart (in)famously defined pornography as "I know it when I see it", and perhaps he was onto something there. What you're looking for is a definition of intelligence that agrees with all the gut feelings you've already decided on regarding the level of intelligence of various entities. Since the underlying decisions here are, in general, so capricious and impulsive--yet now so strongly held--there's no reasonable definition one can come up with to excuse them all equally. This is why coming up with a definition of "intelligence" is useless unless you (a) have a need to objectively define a metric of intelligence, (b) have an objective test to determine whether a given metric is accurate, and (c) are willing to have that metric disagree with you and tell you that you're wrong about something being intelligent or not intelligent. Under any other set of circumstances, it's all just semantic flailing.

Quote:Original post by Rixter
Except isn't that like saying an encyclopedia is intelligence?

No, an encyclopedia is a collection of information (pages in a book, or in the digital age usually an electronic database + interface). My comment about 'search being a tool' was intended to convey that while search may appear as a fundamental component of many instantiations of systems labelled 'artificial intelligence' it is, in and of itself, not a demonstration of intelligence. Just as the hammer, nail and 2x4 are components that can be combined to produce a finished house.

Quote:Original post by Rixter
I would be more inclined to say it's the producing of the solution that is intelligence, not the solution itself.

Yes, you may well need intelligence to create the design and implementation of the end product given only the possible components... but again, that isn't strictly necessary. I could create a machine that builds houses for me. Or I could create a machine that builds machines that builds houses. At some point in that chain there is likely to be some application of intelligence... but that doesn't mean that I couldn't build a system that could interact with the world, learn and adapt itself so that it becomes a house. Now where is the 'intelligence' specific to building houses?

Quote:I would consider skill and creativity to be more attributes of intelligence

I'd consider skill and creativity to be expressions of intelligence. Look back to my original definition for why I take this stance.

Quote:Perhaps our definition of search is different as well.

To formalise my definition, search is a procedure for determining the elements of a set that satisfy an objective... so some examples of search:

finding the members of a set that map to an extremum of an objective function

finding a partition of a set such that at least one disjoint subset returns a disjoint value of a constraint function

A search algorithm (IMO) is then a specific procedure for solving the search problem.

How does your definition differ?

Quote:As you said, one does not need to know how to do something for AI techniques to work, and sometimes not even the end goal. Wouldn't that require some form of search? Wouldn't even the wiring and re-wiring of our brain be a form of search? I don't know.

It may not require an explicit instantiation of a search algorithm, but all learning and adaptation that improves the performance of a system is implicitly a search through the space of possible systems. So yes, learning in the mammalian brain can be considered a search through the set of possible mammalian brains (constrained by the initial state of the current brain and the reachable set of possible brains) for one that improves performance.


As for Emergent's comments...

Yes, in part I agree that 'Artificial Intelligence' is a brand label, just as 'Cola' is a label for a type of carbonated drink. There are many different drinks that might be labelled 'Cola' that don't necessarily fit with the general expectation of what 'Cola' is... and there may or may not be an objective form of 'Cola', nor of 'Artificial Intelligence'. But that doesn't mean we cannot use the label to describe specific instatiations of the product.

The problem with AI is that too many people erroneously apply this label to what they're building so it has lost some of its value (mostly this is a problem seen in business where people are trying to sell products ... look at the hype over artificial neural network based products during the early 80s). Some of those instantiations may indeed by good examples of the product... others not so good... but some of us do believe that it's worth trying to work out if in fact there *is* an objective form of AI... and rather than just philosophise about it, we go out and build systems and evaluate them and ask the question... "is it intelligent"?... and then we get into arguments over our definition of intelligence... and most of us just go back to our labs and ignore it... but sometimes we feel compelled to speak! ;)


As a quick aside... machine learning and Optimal Control should not be considered side by side and I don't believe anyone working in OC would ever claim what they were doing was AI. If though you meant by OC merely the problem of determining an optimal control function/regulator... then ML is just a tool for doing that... as are the formal methods of OC (what we usually call Control Theory).