
A universal measure of intelligence - joshrule
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-01-universal-intelligence.html
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reader5000
Any new measure of intelligence is really just a new definition of
intelligence.

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tel
The point you're making is biting and socially justified, but if you can
accept that there is some measure of intelligence/performance (it's probably
pretty damn high dimensional) at least so much as to help explain why an
avocado can't do software engineering, then it's worth considering that each
new measure helps to get us a more complete understanding thereof.

Furthermore, if it's popular enough (which it probably won't be) then it
becomes ammunition against reemphasizing the multitudinous aspects of
intelligence.

So while the snark is pretty well deserved in light of the way people treat
IQ... I say it's worth applauding further research.

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tgflynn
Basing an intelligence metric on Kolmogorov complexity seems like a really
interesting idea. But Kolmogorov complexity is not computable so I don't
understand how it can be used in practice. Anyone know of any free papers that
provide insight into this ?

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jerf
It's computable enough.

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bioh42_2
Oh joy, another dubious article from physorg.com!

With the science sub-reddit's recent acquisition of real scientist moderators,
I think we have finally reached the point where the science submissions on HN
are less credible then those on reddit.

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bhousel
Article is really light on details.. But they mention that they are basing
their intelligence metric on an organism's Kolmogorov complexity. It sounds to
me like they are quantifying randomness, not intelligence.

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abecedarius
I believe they meant the Kolmogorov complexity of the environment constituting
the problem posed to the agent -- not the complexity of the agent itself. I
don't have access to the paper, though. (Edit: the paper confirms this --
thanks, rubidium.)

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rubidium
Actual paper can be found at one of the authors websites:
[http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~dld/Publications/HernandezOra...](http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~dld/Publications/HernandezOrallo+DoweArtificialIntelligenceJArticle.pdf).

Generally applicable hint: google the paper title. There's often a free pdf
posted somewhere, usually at an author's webpage.

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abecedarius
I'm guessing they mean something like this: repeatedly pose a random
reinforcement-learning problem and record the agent's score. The "IQ" is the
Kolmogorov complexity of the problems at which the agent goes from usually
acing it to usually bombing. If you pick a random program (as your random
problem), its K-complexity is probably near the length of the program, so you
don't need to be able to compute the (uncomputable) K-complexity to get a good
estimate of the above score.

(Based on reading a few words before about Shane Legg's work in the same area,
not yet published AFAIK. This is just a guess since there were very few
details on that too.)

Update: from the paper (thanks to rubidium), on first skim, the above is
basically right. They sum up weighted rewards instead of looking for a
K-complexity that separates good from bad performance -- which I'd thought of
but wasn't sure how to weight scores from problems of different complexity.

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jakeg
There can't be an algorithmic test for intelligence, other than by an equally
or greater intelligent agent, because anything automated has answers static
enough that you can just code specific solutions for them.

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Retric
Read up on RSA encryption it might just blow your mind :)

PS: Creating a problem and measuring the solution need not be as hard as
solving the problem without the "Key".

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acconrad
I hate when articles like this talk about the research, but don't offer
examples of what kind of questions they would ask. I'm much more interested in
knowing what kinds of questions they would ask people and how I would do in
said questionnaire.

