Physicist proposes new way to think about intelligence

I don't think that claim is very bold at all, it is merely an observation. The idea that the algorithm tries to maintain entropy is very much like life as we know it. Life as we know it are mechanisms that despite the continuous dissipation of entropy in the universe around it try to achieve local points of high entropy and sustain those.

In less intelligent animals, the mechanism to resist entropy loss is defined genetically. They can not adapt to new environments because their decision making is rigidly defined in their genes. (i.e. they are like simple computer programs)

In more intelligent animals, like ourselves, instead of deriving our decisions (mainly) from our genes, we derive them from an organ (whose design is derived from genes) we call the brain (I've heard there's more decision making organs). Separating the decision making from the the dna is what makes us so highly adaptable to new environments.

There our likeness to this algorithm lies, like us this algorithm can sustain its entropy no matter what the environment is (as long as its got the tools to do so).

As I've already indicated, there's reason to be skeptical when physicists stretch past the usual boundaries of the discipline. (Though it still could make important contributions.) But modern physics as modern physics is, by and large, solid science.

However while the idea is not new, it does seem like he made a software implementation of some some aspects of it and this could be interesting.

I find the link between thermodynamics and intelligence very interesting. Here is how it works according to me. First the best definition of intelligence IMO is the ability to predict the unknown (whether because it's hidden or because it's in the future) from current knowledge.

In order to have 'intelligence' you have to have some information in your head. That is to say, a part of you has to be physically correlated with a part of the world, some particles in your head have to have patterns that approximately and functionally 'mirror' part of the world.

Thermodynamics is about order and this is also about particles having properties that correlate with each other. This means that in a low entropy situation knowing something about a particle tells you something about some other particles. Intelligence would by useless if the universe had too high entropy. You can't get much insight from white noise even if you are very smart.

There is a saying that "knowledge is power". This is truer than you might think. It is true in a very physical sense.

For example, take the thermodynamic textbook example of a container with a gas on one side and void on the other. If there is no barrier between the two side the gas should move to fill the void and settle in the higher entropy case of evenly filling the space. Thermodynamics says that you would need to spend energy to push the gas back to one side.

However, if you were to put a wall in the middle of the container with a little door large enough to let a molecule go through, and you knew exactly the position and velocity of each molecule in the container, you could open and close the door at exactly the right time when a molecule is about to go from, say, left to right through the door and close it when one is about to go right to left. Using very little energy you could get all molecules to end up on one side of the container.

This should violate the second law of thermodynamics but it does not! Why is that you ask? It's because the knowledge you have of the position and velocity of all these molecules is a source of low entropy. Knowledge is low entropy and the correlation between the particles in your head and the real world is what allows you to make predictions and extract useful energy from things.

Note that an interesting comp sci result of this is that low entropy information is more easy to compress and the more a system is good at predicting data from other data, the better it is at compressing such that there is also a tight link between the concepts of compression algorithms and artificial intelligence. But that's another story.

personally, i don't consider the vast majority of humans to be intelligent.

if we are trying to create artificial intelligence, it's probably a bad idea to use humans as a model.