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Physicist Proposes New Way To Think About Intelligence

Posted by samzenpus on from the look-at-the-big-brain-on-brad dept.

An anonymous reader writes "A single equation grounded in basic physics principles could describe intelligence and stimulate new insights in fields as diverse as finance and robotics, according to new research, reports Inside Science. Recent work in cosmology has suggested that universes that produce more entropy (or disorder) over their lifetimes tend to have more favorable properties for the existence of intelligent beings such as ourselves. A new study (pdf) in the journal Physical Review Letters led by Harvard and MIT physicist Alex Wissner-Gross suggests that this tentative connection between entropy production and intelligence may in fact go far deeper. In the new study, Dr. Wissner-Gross shows that remarkably sophisticated human-like "cognitive" behaviors such as upright walking, tool use, and even social cooperation (video) spontaneously result from a newly identified thermodynamic process that maximizes entropy production over periods of time much shorter than universe lifetimes, suggesting a potential cosmology-inspired path towards general artificial intelligence."

11 of 233 comments (clear)

  1. Oh, he's back from his tour of the universes? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    How was the weather?

    1. Re:Oh, he's back from his tour of the universes? by Xaedalus · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Respectfully asking, what's wrong with saying, "What if?" You are correct, we haven't discovered any of what you described. But what I fail to understand is why you are so quick and so adamant to cite what we don't know and imply that speculation is pointless. The impression I get from your post is that we're better off limiting ourself to what we do know--which eventually just leads us to an endless loop because we never move beyond what we don't know.

      --
      Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
    2. Re:Oh, he's back from his tour of the universes? by Jahta · · Score: 3, Insightful

      But if we don't ask "what if", how is there any advancement? Yes, we'd most likely be wrong--it's only through error do we find the truth. What I fail to understand is how science advances without speculation?

      The problem - eloquently expressed here The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next - arises when theoretical physics comes up with hypotheses that are untested (and even potentially untestable) but people start treating them as grounded theories. This is essentially no different from the intelligent design argument; a position that relies on unprovable speculation that you just have to take on faith.

    3. Re:Oh, he's back from his tour of the universes? by bdwebb · · Score: 3, Insightful
      Informed speculation is exactly what advances the scientific process. If you want to be a librarian of others' knowledge and only work within the sphere of existing information and theory then you provide nothing new to the scientific community except to further back up what we already know.

      Your opinion is the exact reason that most pre-graduate school science classes are garbage...the professors teaching the subject have no imagination and therefore cannot present topics in anything but a dry, unenthusiastic drawl that kills the motivation of potential creative thinkers to seek out new knowledge and to advance our species' understanding of the nature of things. The author is not stating that this new research is anything close to finding a 99.9% solid theory...FTA:

      Our results suggest a potentially general thermodynamic model of adaptive behavior as a nonequilibrium process in open systems.

      Their results suggest a potentially general thermodynamic model of adaptive behavior as a nonequilibrium process in open systems. In other words, more research needs to be done but their initial review and experimental process based on recent advancements in other fields points to a result which he has published a paper around. First, How is this not science? And second, How is this not exactly the type of science that moves our knowledge and understanding forward in the best way? Even if he is proven to be wrong, his results are enticing and can lead others to consider how these results can be differently applied.

  2. Relevant xkcd by Karganeth · · Score: 5, Insightful

    http://xkcd.com/793/

  3. Am I missing something? by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 2, Insightful

    This looks eerily like a physicist who has just opened a biology textbook and is now restating the idea that 'intelligence' is the product of an evolutionary selection process because it's a uniquely powerful solution to the class of problems that certain ecological niches pose and is now attempting to add equations....

    Is there something that I'm missing, aside from the 'being alive means grabbing enough energy to keep your entropy below background levels' and the 'we suspect biological intelligence of having evolved because it provides a fitness advantage in certain ecological niches' elements?

    1. Re:Am I missing something? by Trepidity · · Score: 5, Insightful

      This is what it seems to be from a quick read. It would also explain why he would publish an AI paper in a physics journal, rather than in, you know, an AI journal: probably because he was hoping to get clueless physicists who aren't familiar with existing AI work as the reviewers.

      Which isn't to say that physicists can't make good contributions to AI; a number have. But the ones who have an impact and provide something new: 1) explain how it relates to existing approaches, and why it's superior; and 2) publish their work actually relevant journals with qualified peer-reviewers.

      --
      10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
    2. Re:Am I missing something? by geek · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I grew up right next to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. My dad and the vast majority of my friends moms and dads worked there for a long time as physicists. Being around these people for 35 years has taught me something. They are morons. They know physics but literally nothing else, besides of course math.

      Its one of those strange situations where they can be utterly brilliant in their singular field of study but absolutely incompetent at literally everything else. I've known guys with IQ's in the 160's that couldn't for the life of them live on their own for their inability to cook or clean or even drive a car. I know one of them that was 45 years old and had never had a drivers license. His wife drove him everywhere or he walked (occasionally the bus if the weather was poor). He didn't do this for ideological reasons like climate change blah blah, he did it because he couldn't drive. He failed the drivers test for years until he gave up trying.

      Whenever a physicist starts talking about something other than physics, I typically roll my eyes and ignore them. It's just intellectual masturbation on their part.

  4. Re:Intelligence a man made idea. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    We are better than other animals in the world. By any objective measure we can move faster, go higher, lift more weight, survive in more hostile environments, and a great deal more using our intelligence. There's no animal that can do something better than we can, with a few exceptions like tortoises with very long lifespans, but we'll get there too. Now whether or not that means we are more worthy in some objective way is a totally differerent question.

    Better? Not really, more resourceful? Yes, definitely. And we have to be. Without the use of tools, we'd still be stuck in the Serengeti, treed by lions and tigers. Because, as a species, we are physically weak (probably more today then 100,000 years ago, but still weak in comparison to an orangutan as to the amount we can lift), slow (The fastest man CAN outrun a horse, but no one could outrun a cheetah on the straight away, and can only tolerate a small range of temperatures. (Without clothes, we wouldn't survive a winter outside the tropics) , and go higher? (Or deeper, for that matter) It is only because of tools. We can't fly on our own, we need to bring oxygen with us to high altitudes, we can't hold our breathes for any appreciable time and we need tools to survive depths that other mammals can handle with no problems.

    Take away our ability to make tools, and man is easy prey to the rest of the animal kingdom.

  5. Re:Relevant SMBC by mTor · · Score: 5, Insightful

    And here's a relevant SMBC:

    http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2556

  6. Re:Intelligence a man made idea. by gtall · · Score: 3, Insightful

    BS. Take your basic household feline. It's tricked its owners into feeding, watering, and petting it. Hell, it has even tricked them into taking out the dooty. No living life form comes close to that kind of intelligence.