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Physicist proposes new way to think about intelligence

insidescience.org

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Re: Physicist proposes new way to think about intelligence

#6
Very interesting. The big idea, as I see it, is that intelligent systems try to maintain as many possible futures as they can - to keep their options open.

People often think that all living beings are driven by the need to reproduce, but the need to survive - to maintain homeostasis, to keep one's shape in a complex environment - is even more fundamental, I think.

If you extend the idea of living beings attempting to keep their own metabolism and structure fixed, you realise that if they have the capability, they'll also try and keep their environment fixed.

Re: Physicist proposes new way to think about intelligence

#7
This is fascinating. It proposes that intelligence is about maximizing the control we have over future events, ie maximize the entropy of the system. Intuitively this aligns well with how I think about many strategic options or inflections in life/business - you try to take the path which maximizes future options. Lots of interesting applications, will be interested to see how well they manage to communicate this work across different disciplines.

Re: Physicist proposes new way to think about intelligence

#9
This is a lot like the "efficient cross-domain optimization" definition from Eliezer Yudkowsky. It looks like they even use the same information-theoretic measure of optimization power across the distribution of possible futures. http://lesswrong.com/lw/vb/efficient_crossdomain_optimizatio...
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