X-Message-Number: 8632
Date: Sun, 28 Sep 1997 08:30:53 -0700
From: Peter Merel <>
Subject: Intelligence != Pregnancy

John Pietrzak writes to John Clarke,

>If your brain is ruled by vague and fuzzy rules of thumb, how can you
>give a "concrete" example?  [etc]

Since it seems like you two may go round on this forever I thought I'd
chip in another $0.02:

Perhaps John Clarke's idea is just that intelligence is not 
recursively enumerable? Ie. you might determine that something is not
intelligent, but there's no way to test that it actually is intelligent.
This is obviously similar to the general halting problem - ie. we can
enumerate the programs that halt, but not the ones that don't halt. 

This is entirely reasonable: since any problem may be transformed
into the question of whether or not a particular program will halt,
intelligence is always necessarily limited or else it could solve the 
general halting problem - which is demonstrably impossible.

And then again it remains to be demonstrated that intelligence is not a
relative criterion. I'd suggest a definition of intelligence that admits 
it may be relative:

One process is less intelligent than another with respect to some particular
game iff it loses that game more often than the other.

Plainly, since Turing judges may define whatever games they like, this
is tranformable to the TT. This suggests that "intelligent" is more 
like "high" or "left" than "pregnant". So it seems John Pietrzak may be
barking up a tree that isn't there - intelligence as an absolute criterion
appears to mean nothing at all.

Peter Merel.

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