[Houshalter]

It's not just arbitrary examples, there is reasoning behind it. You can look at humans building spaceships and using tools and demonstrating understanding of abstract concepts. There are a number of tests you could do that would confirm something is intelligent like looking for any of those things.

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.

[chongli]

demonstrating understanding of abstract concepts.

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.

[Houshalter]

You could talk to it or you could have it solve a difficult problem.

[chongli]

Right. That's commonly called the Turing test. This just pushes back the problem of defining intelligence to one of creating a proper Turing test. How do we do that?

[Houshalter]

The Turing test is actually a pretty decent and straightforward 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.

[chongli]

The Turing test is actually a pretty decent and straightforward test.

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

[Houshalter]

I don't see how. Have you ever tried talking to a chatbot? It becomes apparent pretty quickly that it's not intelligent.

[eli_gottlieb]

Has anyone bothered to develop a full mathematical definition of "optimization power"? Because I've been thinking about how to do it.

[Houshalter]

http://lesswrong.com/lw/va/measuring_optimization_power/

[eli_gottlieb]

Bugger. That bastard has 10 years' head start on me; simply not fair.

OTOH, looks like not very much was actually formalized.