I don't think we can have a theory of intelligence. At least in the public consciousness, intelligence is one of those "God-of-the-gaps" style concepts that continually evolves in order to maintain the illusion of human superiority.

But I do agree with your sentiment as far as the way intelligence is usually discussed, even among the science-literate.

Once we figure out all the issues of general intelligence, it will stop seeming so special. We may even begin to think that humans are really bad at it afterall.

Because of this there are a number of games that computers still can't beat because just stupidly trying every possible move doesn't work like it does for chess.

Watson actually does use a lot of natural language processing and machine learning so it is kind of intelligent. Though at it's core it's still just a glorified search engine. Jeopardy was always just a game of memorizing facts, not a demonstration of intelligence.

What people did predict wrong is that it would take general intelligence to solve chess. As in, if you solved chess, you could also pass the Turing test and everything else. Here is a quote from Douglas Hofstadter:

>There may be programs which can beat anyone at chess, but they will not be exclusively chess players. They will be programs of general intelligence, and they will be just as temperamental as people. "Do you want to play chess?" "No, I'm bored with chess. Let's talk about poetry." That may be the kind of dialogue you could have with a program that could beat everyone.

And they would have been right if computers hadn't become exponentially faster.

But then again I'm more interested in the intelligence that differentiates a slime mold from a hurricane than the intelligence that differentiates a human from a chimpanzee.

For example: hurricanes are self-organized, constituted by a structured flow of energy and matter rather than specific pieces of matter. But a hurricane is a slave to the local potential. It will dissipate all the negentropy in its wake, and in doing so maintain its structure. But once there is no more energy differential to dissipate, the hurricane will itself dissipate as it is not able to break free of the local potential and use information to seek out non-local negentropy sources. The question for research is what is necessary to make that jump from self-organization to intelligence, given that operationalization.

Likewise for seeds, fish eggs (carried in the gut of birds), etc.

Also: my definition is meant to include fish and birds, even plants, as intelligent.

How does your comment about sparks address the alternatively stated requirement: "because it perceives more fuel in that direction"

* A spark flies out randomly and contacts a fuel source

* A blind person reaches out randomly and finds a glass of water

What is the essential difference between these events?

In any case my post above implied a definition for perception: responding to low-energy distributions with an asymmetric high-energy response.

Some rough and imperfect, but still useful, definitions of intelligence could be the ability to make good predictions based on past data, the ability to solve optimization problems well, and learning ability.

What sort of test can show that a subject demonstrates an understanding of abstract concepts?

So far, from what I've seen, if a test can be written then software can be written to solve the test.

I don't understand why this is an issue though. Testing intelligence was never the hard part of AI. There are so many tasks that computers currently suck at that we would be happy if they were solved, regardless what label you gave the solution. And I don't think many people could see a computer doing tasks like having conversations or solving difficult problems and deny that it is intelligence. Even if there is no formal test to perform that is 100% certain.

How so? To me, it appears completely open-ended. You could sit there forever asking questions and never reach a definitive result.

OTOH, looks like not very much was actually formalized.

Goedel machines might actually be the closest thing to this in the computing literature, my reaction is less about the work itself than the rhetoric surrounding it, to be honest. JS should collaborate with a physicist on the thermodynamic side of the problem.

If you're intrigued, you could start with the article I linked above, or if you have journal access, anything from the same special issue. I chose that article just because it's the only one not behind a paywall.