The Nature of Intelligence

"Ants are not generally thought of as being particularly smart. But as a model they have one enormous advantage over human brains: an explanation of how apparent complexity can arise without an overseeing designer. A group of dumb ant produces the complexity of the ant colony - an example of organizational intelligence without recourse to the perennial difficulties of religion or philosophy. ... The complicated order of the colony arises not from above, not from a plan, but from below, as a result of many 'dumb,' one-to-one interactions between individual creatures. This phenomenon, known as 'emergence,' produces outcomes that cannot be predicted from looking only at the underlying simple interactions."'
- Programming the Post-Human [p. 64]

General Readings

AISB’05: Social Intelligence and Interaction in Animals, Robots and Agents. The proceedings are available from The Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour (SSAISB). As explained by the General Chair of the conference, Kerstin Dautenhahn: "Why is the theme of Social Intelligence and Interaction interesting to an Artificial Intelligence and Robotics community? We know that intelligence in humans and other animals has many facets and is expressed in a variety of ways in how the individual in its lifetime - or a population on an evolutionary timescale - deals with, adapts to, and co-evolves with the environment. Traditionally, social or emotional intelligence have been considered different from a more problem-solving, often called 'rational', oriented view of human intelligence. However, more and more evidence from a variety of different research fields highlights the important role of social, emotional intelligence and interaction across all facets of intelligence in humans. The Convention theme Social Intelligence and Interaction in Animals, Robots and Agents reflects a current trend towards increasingly interdisciplinary approaches that are pushing the boundaries of traditional science and are necessary in order to answer deep questions regarding the social nature of intelligence in humans and other animals, as well as to address the challenge of synthesizing computational agents or robotic artifacts that show aspects of biological social intelligence."

Metaphorically Speaking. Opinion by Gary H. Anthes. Computerworld (September 9, 2002). "Researchers have really studied the immune system, ants, evolution and other biological phenomena and have invented useful new computational techniques based on them. If you are a creator of software, or even a user of it, you might do well to look to nontraditional sources, biological and otherwise, for inspiration."

Leading humanity forward. By A. Asohan. The Star (October 14, 2003). "[Professor Kevin] Warwick argues that it all depends on how one defines 'intelligence,' a task he attempted in his book QI: The Quest for Intelligence. 'To me, intelligence is a very basic thing. In my book QI, we tried to look at what is intelligence - human intelligence, animal intelligence, machine intelligence ­ and tried to get the basics of it. The conclusion that I would come to now is that it’s the mental ability to sustain successful life. You could then ask what ‘life’ is, and to me it’s something that can keep going, and going. ... That’s when it becomes important when we’re comparing ourselves with machines. Some of the things we do are interesting as far as it concerns us being human - telling jokes and so on - but if we’re ever in a competitive arena with another intellectual form, telling jokes is probably not going to save the human race.'"

Does schmoozing make robots clever? By Matthew Broersma. CNET (August 16, 2002). "Today, development tends to focus on machines that have increasingly complex behaviors and can learn new behaviors. In contrast, [Luc] Steels sees robots progressing by learning to form concepts they can swap with other robots, thereby developing their own "minds," just as humans do. ... Steels' work deals with machine intelligence, but it's a fundamentally different view from that embodied in the famous 'Turing test.' According to the Turing theory, a human-like intelligence has successfully been created when a human can't tell the difference between a conversation with the artificial intelligence and a real one. 'I think the Turing test is a bad idea because it's completely fake,' Steels said. 'It's like saying you want to make a flying machine, so you produce something that is indistinguishable from a bird. On the other hand, an airplane achieves flight but it doesn't need to flap its wings.' Similarly Steels believes that machines can evolve intelligence through interaction with one another and with their ecology -- but this synthetic intelligence it is unlikely to bear much superficial resemblance to human intelligence. ... This notion has met with resistance on both theoretical and practical levels. Some scientists, such as Rodney Brooks of MIT, have argued that intelligent behavior doesn't need internal representations."

Alternate Essences of Intelligence. By Rodney A. Brooks, C. Breazeal (Ferrell), R. Irie, C. Kemp, M. Marjanovic, B. Scassellat and M. Williamson (1998).

• See this interview with Rodney Brooks

Intelligence Relative, Study Says. By Geoff Brumfiel. Wired News (November 26, 2001). "Wakeling and Bak believe that this research, which appears in this month's journal Physical Review E, offers a new perspective on intelligence. It is not the intelligence of a single brain that matters, they claim, but rather the relative intelligence of one to the rest of the pack. ... The idea that intelligence depends upon environment is nothing new, explains Jerry Feldman of the International Computer Science Institute in Berkley, California. For over fifty years, the idea of 'embodied' intelligence -- intelligence defined through its surroundings -- has been discussed amongst AI researchers, he said."

The semantic engineer - Profile: Daniel Dennett. By Andrew Brown. The Guardian (April 17, 2004). "It was at Oxford, too, that he first became interested in computers and the brain. The Oxford philosopher John Lucas had published a paper - still famous - arguing that Gödel's theorem disproved any theory that humans must be machines, and that human thought could be completely simulated on a computer. This is the position Dennett became famous for attacking. ... The essential doctrine that Dennett took from Quine was that knowledge - and philosophy - had to be understood as natural processes. They have arisen as part of the workings of the ordinary world, which can be scientifically studied, and are not imposed or injected from some supernatural realm. So there is nothing magical about human brains - no ghost in the machine, to use Ryle's phrase. When we talk about 'intelligence' we are describing behaviour, or a propensity towards certain behaviour, and not the exercise of some disembodied intellect."

Intelligence Reframed, Multiple Intelligences for the 21st Century: Chapter One. By Howard Gardner. Basic Books, 1999. Chapter One is available from Businessweek Online.

• Also see: Gardner, Howard. 1999. Who Owns Intelligence? The Atlantic Monthly. Volume 283, No. 2 (February 1999) 67 - 76.

Multiple Intelligences: A Theory for Everyone. "Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences makes people think about 'IQ,' about being 'smart.' The theory is changing the way some teachers teach." By Anne Guignon. Education World (1998).

The Trouble with the Turing Test. By Mark Halpern. The New Atlantis Number 11, Winter 2006, pp. 42-63. [This article is an abridged version of a paper - complete with footnotes - which can be accessed from the articles section of the author's website.] "[W]hat Turing grasped better than most of his followers is that the characteristic sign of the ability to think is not giving correct answers, but responsive ones -- replies that show an understanding of the remarks that prompted them. If we are to regard an interlocutor as a thinking being, his responses need to be autonomous; to think is to think for yourself. The belief that a hidden entity is thinking depends heavily on the words he addresses to us being not re-hashings of the words we just said to him, but words we did not use or think of ourselves -- words that are not derivative but original." Non-Symbolic AI - Lecture 2 from Inman Harvey's Non-Symbolic Artifical Intelligence (2003) course, University of Sussex. "AI has tended to concentrate on logic, on calculation, on formal systems as the kind of intelligence to emulate in machines. But recently ­ particularly with the new field of Artificial Life (Alife) ­ people have widened their ideas of what counts as 'intelligence'. The ability of a bird to navigate between N. Europe and S. Africa is amazing, displays some kind of adaptive intelligence ­ but does it use logic?" - Lecture Slide 11.

Fly, But Not Like an Eagle. James Hendler, A Letter from the Editor. IEEE Intelligent Systems (January/February 2006; Volume 21, Number 1). "I think I'm finally starting to understand something that Herb Simon taught. He argued that instead of looking for definitions of intelligence at a purely theoretical level, we would be much better off creating operational definitions that would let us place metrics against terms such as 'creativity,' 'cognizance,' and 'comprehension,' which we consider the hallmark of an intelligent creature. By doing this, he argued, we could see that computers were already able to show significant capabilities on many of these dimensions, and we could use these definitions to measure any progress we continue to make."

Man or Machine? (Part 1 of 3): Human or Robot? Ivanhoe Newswire / available from HealthCentral.com (May 5, 2003). "In the future these experts predict humans and machines will actually merge. Humans will think using non-biological intelligence. [Ray] Kurzweil says, '[In the future] we will have billions of nanobots in the capillaries of our brains, communicating wirelessly with our biological neurons, with the Internet, with each other, and basically expanding human intelligence and experience.' He calls it evolution. 'It's not some alien invasion of intelligent machines. It's coming from within our civilization. It expands our own intellectual powers.'"

Conventional Wisdom Says Machines Cannot Think. By George Johnson. The New York Times (May 9, 1997). "Whether the machine or the man ultimately wins the rematch between Deep Blue and Garry Kasparov, it is probably just a matter of time before a computer prevails. What is far less certain is just what to make of such a victory. How to define intelligence and decide who or what has it remains among science's unsolved, and possibly unsolvable, problems. Whether a machine like Deep Blue, combining lightning-fast search power with a growing database of chess knowledge, can be said to think depends on one's philosophical prejudices."

New research opens a window on the minds of plants. By Patrik Jonsson. The Christian Science Monitor (March 3, 2005). "As trowel-wielding scientists dig up a trove of new findings, even those skeptical of the evolving paradigm of 'plant intelligence' acknowledge that, down to the simplest magnolia or fern, flora have the smarts of the forest. Some scientists say they carefully consider their environment, speculate on the future, conquer territory and enemies, and are often capable of forethought — revelations that could affect everyone from gardeners to philosophers. Indeed, extraordinary new findings on how plants investigate and respond to their environments are part of a sprouting debate over the nature of intelligence itself. 'The attitude of people is changing quite substantially,' says Anthony Trewavas, a plant biochemist at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and a prominent scholar of plant intelligence. 'The idea of intelligence is going from the very narrow view that it's just human to something that's much more generally found in life.' To be sure, there are no signs of Socratic logic or Shakespearean thought, and the subject of plant 'brains' has sparked heated exchanges at botany conferences. ... 'If intelligence is the capacity to acquire and apply knowledge, then, absolutely, plants are intelligent,' agrees Leslie Sieburth, a biologist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. ... The new field of plant neurobiology holds its first conference - The First Symposium on Plant Neurobiology - in May in Florence, Italy."

Creating a Robot Culture - An Interview with Luc Steels. The well-known researcher shares his views on the Turing test, robot evolution, and the quest to understand intelligence. By Tyrus L. Manuel. IEEE Intelligent Systems (May/June 2003). "Human intelligence is obviously the most magnificent manifestation of intelligence in the natural world. So it is quite natural that this remains a source of inspiration. But we cannot be only human-centered in our evaluation criteria."

Swarm Behavior - A single ant or bee isn't smart, but their colonies are. The study of swarm intelligence is providing insights that can help humans manage complex systems, from truck routing to military robots. By Peter Miller. National Geographic Magazine (July 2007). "'Ants aren't smart,' [Deborah M.] Gordon says. 'Ant colonies are.' A colony can solve problems unthinkable for individual ants, such as finding the shortest path to the best food source, allocating workers to different tasks, or defending a territory from neighbors. As individuals, ants might be tiny dummies, but as colonies they respond quickly and effectively to their environment. They do it with something called swarm intelligence. ... . It relies instead upon countless interactions between individual ants, each of which is following simple rules of thumb. Scientists describe such a system as self-organizing."

Thoughts About Artificial Intelligence. By Marvin Minsky. From Ray Kurzweil's 1990 book, The Age of Intelligent Machines. "What is intelligence, anyway? It is only a word that people use to name those unknown processes with which our brains solve problems we call hard. But whenever you learn a skill yourself, you're less impressed or mystified when other people do the same. This is why the meaning of 'intelligence' seems so elusive: ... "

Hidden In Nature. The New York Times (September 9, 2002). "What if we could actually harness nature's secrets to create remarkable new inventions - insect based robots, armies of artificial ants? Scientists are just beginning to reap the benefits of using nature's way to solve problems. ... Studying how animals move can teach how to build better machines, but studying how animals behave can teach us a whole new way to think. Doctor Eric Bonabeau is one of the proponents of a new branch of science called swarm intelligence. A flock of birds, a swarm of bees; it looks like they're following a complex plan. But research into how swarms and flocks behave reveals that each ant or bee is actually following only a few simple rules of behavior, which when multiplied by thousands achieves astonishing feats. Dr. Alcherio Martinoli and his colleagues are simulating these behaviors in the lab to try to learn how to make groups of robots work together, just like ants."

Time for real intelligence? By Ivan Noble. BBC (January 25, 2001). "[C]omputer scientist Professor Juyang Weng, of Michigan State University, US, says it is time to work on systems which 'live' autonomously, have bodies suited to their working environment and learn in a general sense. ... 'The essence of mental development is to enable robots to autonomously live in the world and to become smart on their own, with some supervision by humans,' he writes."

• Read the article featured in the BBC report: Artificial Intelligence - Autonomous Mental Development by Robots and Animals, by Juyang Weng, James McClelland, Alex Pentland, Olaf Sporns, Ida Stockman, Mriganka Sur, and Esther Thelen in Science, Volume 291 Number 5504, pages 599-600 (January 26, 2001).
• Vision-Guided Autonomous Navigation. Video clips from the SAIL and Dav Developmental Robot Projecst (the Developmental Approach to Machine Intelligence for vision, speech, language, reasoning, robotics and mind) at Michigan State University.

Intelligence in the Internet age - It's a question older than the Parthenon: Do new innovations and technologies make us more intelligent?; From ape to 'Homo digitas'?; and Are we getting smarter or dumber? A three part series by Stefanie Olsen. CNET News.com (September 19 - 21, 2005). "CNET News.com.

Where do i begin? By Stephen Pincock. The Financial Times (March 11, 2005). "Cyborgs are all around us. ... The dictionary definition of a cyborg is 'an integrated man-machine system'. They turn up in movies as flesh and metal characters such as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator, Darth Vader from Star Wars or, for those of an older vintage, Steve Austin, the Six Million Dollar Man. The term emerged in the 1960s, coined by researchers interested in how humans could adapt to space travel. ... Instead, I want to focus on a definition of cyborg that relates to our use of technology in a more general way. It is a definition that has sprung from a scientific view of the way our mind works and how its functions extend beyond our brains. ... The man I most wanted to contact was a philosopher of cognitive science, Andy Clark, professor of logic and metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh, and a leading proponent of the idea of the extended mind. Two years ago, Clark published a book entitled Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies and the Future of Human Intelligence, which explored the way that human minds interact with technology - from the pencil to web-enabled mobile phones. ... Clark argues that there is little significant conceptual difference between a highly accessible computer outside our body, and one implanted into our body. ... He urges us to give up the idea that the only things that matter about our minds are what goes on inside 'the ancient fortress of skin and skull'. Instead, technologies such as the internet should be seen as integral parts of the systems that constitute human intelligence."

Are children getting cleverer? By Richard Tomkins. The Financial Times (August 12, 2006). "As far as definitions go, there seems to be a consensus that whatever intelligence is, it is not just knowledge. It is the ability to make connections, solve problems, reason, think abstractly and understand complex ideas. As for measurement: well, as it happens, these are just the qualities that IQ tests set out to assess. And this is where it gets interesting, because in the early 1980s, James Flynn - at 72 now an emeritus professor at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand - made the startling discovery that IQ scores round the world are rising at a rate of around three points per decade, though the gains vary from one country or period to another. This phenomenon, now known as the Flynn effect, had previously gone unnoticed because the tests were continually renormalised to keep the mean score at 100. ... Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist at Harvard University and author of several popular science books including The Blank Slate and How The Mind Works, says: 'In terms of basic raw brainpower, most evolutionary biologists would say it's unlikely that people are any smarter today than they were a couple of centuries or even millennia ago. Evolution is a slow process and a few millennia are not much time for smarter people to out-reproduce duller ones enough to change the make-up of the species.' If it sometimes seems as if we are more intelligent than our ancestors in, say, the Dark Ages, Pinker says, that is because our cultural tools, from the printing press to artificial intelligence, have made us cleverer collectively - that is, in terms of what we can accomplish as a species - 'even if every one of us is no smarter than Plato was'. But if we are not getting cleverer as individuals why are our IQ scores going up? ... Flynn himself believes the most likely explanation is that changes in the environment have given us more opportunity to exercise the kinds of skills that IQ tests measure."

Related Resources

About Intelligence. Reference point on understanding intelligence and how we can use it. Features and articles are written by professional journalists and experts who have a particular interest, or a background in this area.

The Cognition and Affect Project at the University of Birmingham School of Computer Science's Cognitive Science Research Centre. "The main goal of this project is to understand the types of architectures that are capable of accounting for the whole range of human mental states and processes, including not only intelligent behaviour but also moods, emotions, desires, and the like. In particular we wish to explore the question whether the ability to have emotional states is an accident of animal evolution or an inevitable consequence of design requirements and constraints, for instance in resource-limited intelligent robots."

Theories of Intelligence: Meta-level theories regarding the nature of mechanisms for intelligence. From Cognitive Architectures, a project by MeeSook Hyun, Eric W. Miller, Joseph Phillips, and Ryan Smith; University of Michigan Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. "Developing concurrently with Integrated Cognitive Architectures is the theory of what constitues an architecture for intelligence. Each individual author has his or her own viewpoints, and of course develops their respective system accordingly. There are however some 'meta-level' theories about what, in general, is necessary for intelligence. A select few of the more promenent theories are discussed in general below. Each theory then is linked to specific architectures which either seem to support or refute its claims."

Related AITopics Pages

• Artificial Life
• But is it AI? (vignettes, including one about a cockroach)
• Cognitive Science
• Neuroscience & Cognitive Computing
• Philosophy
• Turing Test

Other References Offline

• Feeling Like an Animal, a review by Barbara Beckwith (Harvard Magazine; March-April 2000): "'Yes, animals think and feel,' says Hauser, 'but not necessarily like us.' He and his veterinarian wife own a dog, two cats, fish, and two rabbits, whom they say they love despite their view that the love they give may not be the same as what they receive. When referring to pets, Hauser avoids umbrella terms like 'intelligent' and 'sensitive.' He says, 'We can be more precise and ask, What do animals remember? How do they represent objects? What kinds of emotions, aside from basic visceral reactions such as fear, do they experience toward things that attack them or cuddle them?' Hauser argues that animals may not experience feeling-thought states like guilt or sympathy, which depend on self-awareness. 'Perhaps only humans have a consciousness of self,' says Hauser."
  • Visit the Primate Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory at Harvard University.

Lenat, Douglas B. and Feigenbaum, Edward A. On the Thresholds of Knowledge. Artificial Intelligence 47(1-3): 185-250 (1991) -and- IJCAI 1987: 1173-1182 Ullman, Ellen. 2002. Programming the Post-Human: Computer science redefines "life." Harper's, Vol. 305, No. 1829: 60-70. See excerpt above. Exploring Intelligence. A special issue of Scientific American (November 1998). Here are just two of the many relevant articles you'll find:

• Intelligence Considered. By Philip Yam, issue editor. "Most people can identify intelligent signals, be they from a person, animal or machine. But can brainpower be measured, quantified and changed? Is human reasoning similar to how an animal might obtain a hidden treat or how a machine decides to trade a rook for a bishop? A definition is trickier than it might appear."
• The General Intelligence Factor. By Linda S. Gottfredson. "Also known as g, the general intelligence factor is what IQ tests are all about. Despite the political controversy surrounding it, the test scores and their differences, the author argues, are meaningful indicators not only of academic performance but also of future life outcomes, such as employment, divorce and poverty.