Physicist Proposes New Way To Think About Intelligence

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."

Comments

nintendo!

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting idea. http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/14/nes-robot/

That guy took basically a random generator and 'picked' good results to build on. However the input is basically chaos.

Intelligence a man made idea.

[jellomizer]

Intelligence was invented by man, as a way to make them seem better then other animals in the world.
Then we further classified it down so we can rank people.

So it isn't surprising if we want to find intelligent life outside of earth, then we need to change the rules again, as well we need to change the rules of what intelligence is by the fact we have created technology that emulates or exceeds us in many areas we use to classify intelligence.

Intelligence is a man made measurement, I expect it will always be in flux. However you shouldn't dismiss or automatically accept as good ideas just because someone number that was granted by a fluctuating scale.

Re:Intelligence a man made idea.

[Intrepid imaginaut]

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.

Re:Intelligence a man made idea.

[femtobyte]

For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.

-- Douglas Adams

Choice

[rtb61]

Intelligence, the ability to delve into the past and reach into the future, in order to craft the present and manipulate the probability of eventualities. The greater the ability the greater the intellect, the power of choice.

This is so sad

[rpresser]

The universe developed intelligence as a way of making entropy wind down faster ... which will destroy all intelligence ... which is a tragedy because the winding down was necessary to create us ... and the universe WANTED TO SEE US SUFFER.

Re:Am I missing something?

[Anonymous Coward]

This. I've been a physics student for a third of my life and I've come to the conclusion that I cannot live with other physicists for precisely this reason. Poked my nose into the maths & compsci faculty for a bit, but they were no better.
In any case, in this concrete situation: the paper mentioned in TFA gives us not even one hint on how to construct an AI and is chock-full of absurd simplification of a complicated system.

Re:when I want to maximize entropy ...

[femtobyte]

The point in the paper that addresses the "burn shit to be smart!" concept is that the "intelligence" is operating on a simplified, macroscopic model of the world, which doesn't pay attention to the microscopic entropy of chemical bonds (increased by setting stuff on fire). In this simplified "critter-scale" world, shorter-term entropy gain *is* the driving compulsion. The toy model "crow reaching food with a stick" example wasn't driven by the crow thinking "gee, if I don't eat now, I'll be dead next year, so I'd better do something about that." Instead, the problem was "solved" by the crow maximizing entropy a few seconds ahead --- e.g. it moves to reach the stick, because there are a lot more system states available if the stick can be manipulated instead of just lying in the same place on the ground. The "intelligent behavior" only needs to maximize entropy on the time-scale associated with completing the immediate task --- a few seconds --- rather than "long term" considerations about nutritional needs.

Re:Oh, he's back from his tour of the universes?

[iluvcapra]

The authors propose a toy mathematical model that reproduces key features of several interesting observed behaviors.

Yeah, like string theory.

The problem is that the approach is essentially definitional: They created a software model that does X. X "looks like" the sort of things an animal or an "intelligence" might do, thus the investigator postulates the "physical process of trying to capture as many future histories as possible" as "intelligence."

The problem comes from the analogy of the behavior of the software to "intelligence," and the false analogy linking it to something other beings do. It remains to be proven that this is what biological systems actually do, except that the experiment establishes no falsifiable procedure for doing that; thus, the extrapolation of the model's behavior to anything living is nothing more than science fiction or pure conjecture, based utterly on the subjective appraisal of the investigator.