Ruminations on Intelligence
I decided I wanted to use the word 'ruminations' today, and so I did. Yay.
Anyway...
I was at work at about 5:00, waiting to go home. There was nothing to do and I was sitting outside, watching insects on the concrete. Now, when my mind is wandering like this, I like to think a lot, often thinking about the way it is that I am thinking, and so now I present what my mind goes through on a day-to-day basis.
So I was watching a spider move. I think it was a wolf spider of some sort, because they like to jump, and this one jumped just about whenever it moved. Anyway, I was also watching an ant and a beetle. Specifically, I was noting how they move. The beetle was just kind of trudging along, no cares whatsoever. The ant was rushing around in circles, like it had some purpose but it didn't know what. The spider, however, was different. It moved with what looked like purpose. Its moves were all intentional, like it had a plan. Basically, it moved with intelligence.
I decided (then and there) that this is a good model for the evolution of intelligence in species. At least in early evolution, the amount of intelligence necessary is inversely proportional to the ease with which you get food. The beetle probably just eats plants/fungus, and so it just wanders aimlessly with no need for intelligence. The ant has to find food, so it needs the intelligence in order to search and in order to know what to search for. The spider, on the other hand, is a predator. It has to know how to find prey. For this it requires more than just the bare minimum. It requires tactics. So that means that in theory, carnivores would of necessity be smarter than herbivores. But what about omnivores? Putting them in the middle doesn't seem to make sense, since they include things like bears and primates (including us). From there I started to think, just what is intelligence? How does being able to find more exclusive food sources make you smarter? My mind had already decided that the spider was smarter than the beetle or the ant. Now I had to figure out why.
So now my mind wandered to what the spider has that the ant has less of and the beetle even less. I'm not sure if this follows proper logic but when I'm thinking random thoughts logic isn't an issue. Anyway, I decided almost immediately that the answer is inherent in what they have to do to get food. The beetle (Which we can substitute for any lazy grazing animal (like cows)) just wanders until food is there. If there is none, move on. The ant, however, has another problem, because it has to find food for something that isn't itself. It has to bring food to the queen. Therefore, it must actively be able to locate food, and then be able to transport it where to the queen. The spider, compared to these two, has the most problems of all. It has to be able to track down active food sources that move and evade it. It has to be able to locate them, ambush them, and bring them down without getting itself hurt in the process. So, the further up you go, the more problems become apparent. From this I concluded that intelligence is defined by and measured by the ability to solve problems.
What exactly does this imply? After putting further thought to my definition, it seems to make sense. If you have an opposing army of five men and your army is five hundred, no intelligence is needed. Just tell your force to walk forward and trample them. But if it's the other way around, you have a big problem. Now you need a plan. You need to find a way to demoralize the opposing army so it doesn't want to fight. You need to divide the enemy so that they cannot push the advantage of numbers. Finally, you need to make them believe the whole time that they cannot lose, so that they will not employ intelligence to defeat you. So intelligence is the ability to solve a problem. This means that evolution would favor species with intelligence more often than those without (humans vs the dodo bird). It also tells us that omnivorous species are probably more intelligent than exclusive carnivores (already assumed with bear and primate examples), because expanding your list of food sources and being able to procure more sources would help to solve food resource problems.
At this point, like most chains of thought in humanity, my thoughts turned to robots, more specifically, their taking over of our world. Artificial intelligence is considered both important and a great threat in our immediate future. But what identifies true artificial intelligence versus just computation? Assume we are accepting our methods of thought as intelligence and a computer program (such as the AI of a chess game) as computation. What problems does computation face that we do not? I don't remember how long it took me to reach an answer, but I know it wasn't long. I concluded that computation is limited by rules and what the code decides, whereas intelligence isn't forced to conform to any set of rules. When you play chess vs. a chess game AI, you know that all it can do is the moves it was programmed for. But vs. a person, maybe they will decide to get you drunk during the game so that they can slip in a few illegal moves. Sure, it isn't allowed in theory, but if you don't notice the rule broken (in this case, both because you may not have seen it, and because you are completely shit-faced), you won't challenge anything, and the other player will win. So, when will the robots take over? Simple. When they can operate outside their own code.
So, in conclusion, my thoughts on the nature and application of intelligence probably made no sense to anyone. I'm not even sure I had a reason to say most of this. I guess I thought it was interesting and didn't want to forget it.
And as a side not, I got New Super Mario Brothers a few days ago. Freakin' sweet.
Anyway...
I was at work at about 5:00, waiting to go home. There was nothing to do and I was sitting outside, watching insects on the concrete. Now, when my mind is wandering like this, I like to think a lot, often thinking about the way it is that I am thinking, and so now I present what my mind goes through on a day-to-day basis.
So I was watching a spider move. I think it was a wolf spider of some sort, because they like to jump, and this one jumped just about whenever it moved. Anyway, I was also watching an ant and a beetle. Specifically, I was noting how they move. The beetle was just kind of trudging along, no cares whatsoever. The ant was rushing around in circles, like it had some purpose but it didn't know what. The spider, however, was different. It moved with what looked like purpose. Its moves were all intentional, like it had a plan. Basically, it moved with intelligence.
I decided (then and there) that this is a good model for the evolution of intelligence in species. At least in early evolution, the amount of intelligence necessary is inversely proportional to the ease with which you get food. The beetle probably just eats plants/fungus, and so it just wanders aimlessly with no need for intelligence. The ant has to find food, so it needs the intelligence in order to search and in order to know what to search for. The spider, on the other hand, is a predator. It has to know how to find prey. For this it requires more than just the bare minimum. It requires tactics. So that means that in theory, carnivores would of necessity be smarter than herbivores. But what about omnivores? Putting them in the middle doesn't seem to make sense, since they include things like bears and primates (including us). From there I started to think, just what is intelligence? How does being able to find more exclusive food sources make you smarter? My mind had already decided that the spider was smarter than the beetle or the ant. Now I had to figure out why.
So now my mind wandered to what the spider has that the ant has less of and the beetle even less. I'm not sure if this follows proper logic but when I'm thinking random thoughts logic isn't an issue. Anyway, I decided almost immediately that the answer is inherent in what they have to do to get food. The beetle (Which we can substitute for any lazy grazing animal (like cows)) just wanders until food is there. If there is none, move on. The ant, however, has another problem, because it has to find food for something that isn't itself. It has to bring food to the queen. Therefore, it must actively be able to locate food, and then be able to transport it where to the queen. The spider, compared to these two, has the most problems of all. It has to be able to track down active food sources that move and evade it. It has to be able to locate them, ambush them, and bring them down without getting itself hurt in the process. So, the further up you go, the more problems become apparent. From this I concluded that intelligence is defined by and measured by the ability to solve problems.
What exactly does this imply? After putting further thought to my definition, it seems to make sense. If you have an opposing army of five men and your army is five hundred, no intelligence is needed. Just tell your force to walk forward and trample them. But if it's the other way around, you have a big problem. Now you need a plan. You need to find a way to demoralize the opposing army so it doesn't want to fight. You need to divide the enemy so that they cannot push the advantage of numbers. Finally, you need to make them believe the whole time that they cannot lose, so that they will not employ intelligence to defeat you. So intelligence is the ability to solve a problem. This means that evolution would favor species with intelligence more often than those without (humans vs the dodo bird). It also tells us that omnivorous species are probably more intelligent than exclusive carnivores (already assumed with bear and primate examples), because expanding your list of food sources and being able to procure more sources would help to solve food resource problems.
At this point, like most chains of thought in humanity, my thoughts turned to robots, more specifically, their taking over of our world. Artificial intelligence is considered both important and a great threat in our immediate future. But what identifies true artificial intelligence versus just computation? Assume we are accepting our methods of thought as intelligence and a computer program (such as the AI of a chess game) as computation. What problems does computation face that we do not? I don't remember how long it took me to reach an answer, but I know it wasn't long. I concluded that computation is limited by rules and what the code decides, whereas intelligence isn't forced to conform to any set of rules. When you play chess vs. a chess game AI, you know that all it can do is the moves it was programmed for. But vs. a person, maybe they will decide to get you drunk during the game so that they can slip in a few illegal moves. Sure, it isn't allowed in theory, but if you don't notice the rule broken (in this case, both because you may not have seen it, and because you are completely shit-faced), you won't challenge anything, and the other player will win. So, when will the robots take over? Simple. When they can operate outside their own code.
So, in conclusion, my thoughts on the nature and application of intelligence probably made no sense to anyone. I'm not even sure I had a reason to say most of this. I guess I thought it was interesting and didn't want to forget it.
And as a side not, I got New Super Mario Brothers a few days ago. Freakin' sweet.
posted by Derek at 8:20 PM
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