sutton2020john: John McCarthy's definition of intelligence
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- tags
- Artificial Intelligence, Intelligence
- source
- http://www.incompleteideas.net/papers/Sutton-JAGI-2020.pdf
- authors
- Sutton, R. S.
- year
- 2020
In this paper, the authors take John McCarthy’s statement on artificial intelligence being
“Intelligence is the computational part of the ability to achieve goals in the world.”
and considers the consequences of the various parts. While the statement at large seems quite explainable, the understanding of what it means for an agent to “achieve goals” is unclear. In the paper, the author discusses that defining this is a stance of the observer onto a system. For instance, to someone who uses a thermostat they see the thermostat trying to maintain the temperature, which can be thought of as the goal from the point of this observer. But a handy man who needs to fix the thermostat will consider the system from a mechanistic view, which removes the mirage of intelligence or “having goals”. In light of this idea that have a goal is just a stance of the observer we can add to the definition of intelligence:
Intelligence is the computational part of the ability to achieve goals. A goal achieving system is one that is more usefully understood in terms of outcomes than in terms of mechanisms.