Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fair enough, but can we imagine a better algorithm?
I've always assumed any real machine intelligence would be scalable to the point where even if it started at a millionth the functionality of a human, it would end up far surpassing humanity.
We don't see animals self-improving to become humans (in the "consciously deciding what revisions to make to their mental architecture at each step" sense), so why would you expect electronic animal-level minds to be able to do the same to become electronic human-level minds, or beyond?
Personally, I doubt even electronic human-equivalent minds would be capable of self-improvement. After all, we are not smart enough to build AIs better than us (yet), so why should electronic minds only as smart as we are be capable of that, either?
A possible answer to that, I suppose, would be that the electronic mind would have far more input/training data fed to it per second than biological minds receive, and far more time to "work on" that sense data to derive patterns between each decision-step.