What are the characteristics of intelligence?
What is the "lowest" lifeform that you are willing to acknowledge as intelligent?
Is an ant intelligent?
What about an ant colony?
The computer Deep Blue, developed by a research team at IBM (including Murray Campbell, former Alberta junior chess champion and a U. of A. alumnus), won the world chess championship on May 11, 1997, in New York City, beating Garry Kasparov, the world's most highly rated Grandmaster by a score of 3.5 points to 2.5 points (two wins, three draws, and one loss). Is Deep Blue intelligent?
What would be required to convince you that a machine (i.e., a computer or a robot) was intelligent? If we could build a computer like the HAL 9000 from Arthur C. Clarke's and Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, would you accept it as a conscious intelligence?
In their book Understanding Intelligence (MIT Press, 1999), Rolf Pfeifer and Christian Scheier identify some commonsense notions about intelligence, noting that, "ultimately, the scientific study of intelligence must relate to them."
We distinguish levels of intelligence, ordering living beings as more or less intelligent.
The scale is not linear however -- skill or talent in math, music, essay writing, and survival in the wild are evidence of different types of intelligence which are not comparable.
Thinking, including problem solving and logical reasoning, is often regarded as an essential characteristic of intelligence (although more people are willing to regard animals such as dogs and pigs as intelligent than would grant that they think).
Thinking is often associated with conscious thought.
"Many people view learning as the core property of intelligence," although it is usually not learning per se that matters, but the capacity to learn. Memory for useful knowledge and the ability to transfer knowledge is considered important (but rote learning and memory as storage are not).
Communication in natural language -- talking, reading, and writing -- "is often considered to be the hallmark of intelligence."
Many regard intuition -- "arriving at conclusions without a train of logical thought that can be traced to its origins" -- and creativity as the highest forms of human intelligence. Some distinguish between thinking as independent of emotion and creativity as engaging the emotions.
"Consciousness is often seen as an essential ingredient of intelligence." Thinking, language, and creativity are thought to require consciousness.
Although emotions are considered an essential part of being human, it is debatable whether they should be considered an essential feature of intelligent beings. However, sophisticated emotions such as jealousy, shame, or guilt seem to depend on intelligence.
We attribute intelligence to creatures which engage in sophisticated survival behaviors such as using tools, building nests and towers (termites), and communicating by dancing (bees). [Does voting an opponent off the island count?]
While most laypeople don't consider perceptual and motor abilities (such as walking) as signs of intelligence, science regards them as important research issues.
In a 1950 article, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, in the journal Mind (Vol. LIX. No.236), Alan Turing posed the question:
Can machines think?
To avoid attempting to define the word "think", Turing proposes to replace this question with another, based on what he calls the "imitation game", in which an interrogator poses questions to a man and a woman in a separate room in an attempt to identify which is the man and which is the woman.
Turing's substitute question, which we now call the "Turing Test", is:
What will happen when a machine takes the part of [the man] in this game?
Some observations on the Turing Test, Turing's examples of how the dialogue might proceed, and Turing's responses to the objections which he foresees:
Turing proposes to use the same sort of test as is frequently used as a supplementary exam in the British university system: a viva voce (oral) examination.
As Turing notes in his response to Professor Lister's "Argument from Consciousness", such a test is frequently used "to discover whether some one really understands something or has 'learnt it parrot fashion'."
This kind of a test focuses on the use of natural language as the primary indicator of thinking, with problem solving (e.g., arithmetic problems), logical reasoning (e.g., chess moves), and creativity (e.g., poetry writing) as subsidiary indicators.
Turing views thinking as the equivalent of intelligence. His proposed test purposely eliminates consideration of perceptual and motor skills and the sorts of intelligence needed to survive in the "real world".
As Abelard argues, it is better to think of the Turing Test as a benchmark than a definition of intelligence.
Note that in Turing's sample question and answer
Q: Add 34957 to 70764the answer given is incorrect.
A: (Pause about 30 seconds and then give as answer) 105621.
Turing's droll sense of humour is apparent in his response to the "Argument from Consciousness", which demands not only that the machine appear to be thinking, but that it be aware of its own thinking. Turing notes that the only way to be sure that a machine is thinking is "to be the machine and to feel oneself thinking," just as the only way to be sure that a person is thinking is to be that person, and concludes:
Instead of arguing continually over this point it is usual to have the polite convention that everyone thinks.
The Alan
Turing Home Page, maintained by Andrew Hodges, author of
Alan Turing: the Enigma
(See especially The Turing
Test in The Alan Turing Internet Scrapbook.)
The Turing
test and intelligence, an essay by Abelard (1998)
Why People Think Computers Can't by Marvin Minsky (MIT)
Cognition
and Computation, a course offered at Rutgers by Charles F.
Schmidt
HAL's Legacy -- the entire book about
HAL, the intelligent computer from the movie 2001: A Space
Odyssey (Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick, 1968), available
online
The Deep Blue Team Plots Its Next Move by John Horgan,
Scientific American, "In Focus", March 08, 1996 (after the
first Deep Blue - Gary Kasparov match)
A
Grandmaster Chess Machine by Murray Campbell , Andreas Nowatzyk
, Feng-hsiung Hsu and Thomas Anantharaman, originally published in
Scientific American, October, 1990
