They're not intelligent with respect to the goals they're not achieving. Or they're competing with other people that are more 'intelligent'. There are (of course!) confounding factors but, all else being equal, the more intelligent agent should win.
Let's use a concrete example. Consider someone that's very good at solving math problems but is unhappy with their job. What's the problem with just considering that they're intelligent with respect to solving math problems but bad at (all of the skills necessary to be good at) finding a satisfying job?
Achieving goals, winning 'games', etc., seems like a really useful and really general way of measuring the effectiveness of things and that seems pretty close to, if not exactly, what intelligence is (if it's any one thing in particular).
> I'd suggest that intelligence is not the achievement of goals but the formulation of goals.
What's the motivation to define intelligence in that way?
Not necessarily. An intelligent agent could lose to an agent that can simply see the future.
Seeing the future has a tendency of becoming paradoxical when you start acting on that information though.
The paradoxes are the same as in time travel. Imagine your best sees itself hunted down two days in advance; it simply goes somewhere else so the hunters don't find it. Then it didn't really see the future, did it?
depends on your model of time and the universe, i suppose. perhaps "a future" vs "the future".
Well, a lot of very intelligent people never achieve their goals either.
I'd suggest that intelligence is not the achievement of goals but the formulation of goals. And funny enough, people generally have no self-awareness about how they come to have goals. Some kid grows up wanting to be a fighter pilot. Why? Why does some other kid want to be a writer?
Why do I like peach ice cream more than chocolate? Achieving the goal of getting some peach ice cream is a lot easier than understanding why I want to.
Intelligent beings want things, on their own. Rational consciousness is just the tool we use to get what we want. The importance of articulated self-awareness to intelligence is probably overstated by humans.