I can't think of any phenomenon less likely area to have a simple algorithm than intelligence.

I can't think of any phenomenon less likely area to have a simple algorithm than intelligence.

Cf. Evolution.

You're darn well gonna wait -- and LIKE it!

Fortunately, it takes significantly less time than that -- no more than three and a half billion years. Haha, and you were worried!

It's actually amazing if not ridiculous that researchers always start from the other end of a cigar: they raise ideas, one after another, but they don't even try to explain what problem exactly they are solving.

The process of discovery is hands-on, learning by doing. You don't know all the rules at the outset, or all the definitions, or even know what you don't know. You find out as you go along. Thus it has been for every great invention from sex to agriculture to post-it notes to landing a man on the Moon and back to on-demand porn.

The real requirement is that we have some way to test it; that we can do, e.g. by conversation. To cop an example from quantum mechanics (which I know nothing about), we don't have to understand why it is like that in order to make predictions with it.

We don't need a clear and unambiguous definition of intelligence in order to tell that other human beings are intelligent. Likewise, we don't need one in order to start trying to create an artifice that impresses us into thinking it also is intelligent.

This was quite impressive, and on the right track, seemingly: http://hci.stanford.edu/~winograd/shrdlu/

The problem here is that not every human being is intelligent and yes, we are actually trying to define intelligence through IQ tests, for example.

Likewise, we don't need one in order to start trying to create an artifice that impresses us into thinking it also is intelligent.

So when you need accounting software you say: "write me something that will be as clever as my accountant". Is that the way you formulate tasks for software engineers?

Fail. IQ tests only measure how well you do on IQ tests.

> The problem here is that not every human being is intelligent

Unless they're in a vegetative state, they are more intelligent than any artificial system, so far.

> Is that the way you formulate tasks for software engineers?

The only way to make a specification so precise that it does exactly what you want is to implement it, and then the code itself becomes the specification.

And yes, it's the way programming works - when you know what you are trying to achieve. Software is about input and output and unless they are deterministic, you can't write code.

Obviously people say that all the time despite our lack of a definition for exactly what it is, so we apparently don't need an exact definition.

> and unless they are deterministic, you can't write code.

You might be interested to know that the behavior of your OS isn't deterministic once you add a second CPU.

SHRDLU is nothing more than a really well-done ELIZA for a really small domain.