Well the good approach that requires a halting oracle is AIXI, which uses semi-approximable (IIRC on the terminology) Solomonoff Induction hooked up to an expectimax tree.
So it does have to examine every possible "universe" as a Turing Machine, but it uses proven-convergent probabilistic reasoning to get rid of the bad ones and raise good hypotheses to the top much faster than a universal search.
>The speed of intelligence scales. But not the quality of it. > >The quality of intelligence is something very hard to quantify. But as simply as I can state it, it's the quality of coming up with an idea that is not just an extension of an existing one, but an idea that came seemingly from nowhere. To someone else the idea appears magic, and no amount of thinking by that other person can lead him in a path that will end up there.
To be frank, before I'll believe this I want to see studies done on either humans or a mathematical examination of formal models of intelligent agents.
I think "never" is much too strong a word, considering that we seem to have a huge abundance of people capable of learning calculus even though few can rediscover it from scratch. There appear to exist very many people who would require such great efforts to learn certain things that doing so would be unpractical, but very few who simply cannot learn things no matter how much effort they put in.
The speed of intelligence scales. But not the quality of it.
The quality of intelligence is something very hard to quantify. But as simply as I can state it, it's the quality of coming up with an idea that is not just an extension of an existing one, but an idea that came seemingly from nowhere. To someone else the idea appears magic, and no amount of thinking by that other person can lead him in a path that will end up there.
> but they are an indication that such a thing could be possible.
Real genius is not just "more" intelligence, it's intelligence of a different type that a non-genius simply can not do, no matter how they try. Analogously, just because a computer can do something fast does not give it that hard to define quality of true intelligence.
To make (rather than randomly search for) a computer with real intelligence we need to understand what it is, and where it comes from, and we don't know either one of those things. Our best (smartest) computers are all variations of "search randomly" (for example chess engines). Those can do some amazing things, but their limitations will not be overcome by doing more of the same.
> infinite computing power .. every possible
Talking about infinity is a total red herring and you know that - especially because if your method of increasing intelligence is "search randomly" then an AI will not be able to make a better AI - all it can do is continue the random search humans already started.