What are Intelligence? And Why?

by

Randall Davis

Summary

Various fields have attempted to adopt AI as their own, and thus by doing that they put their assumptions, models and metaphors onto the field. Many times this doesn't mesh well, and well, that is how academic religious wars start. Davis begins by defining the four behaviors used to distinguish intelligent behavior, and also list the five fields contributing to "reason". Davis then goes on the give a brief summary of each fields approach to AI (machine logic, intelligence as a biological function....). Davis then transitions to the why of intelligence, discussing how evolution got use here. Evolution is blind search, is isn't engineering. Davis also notes that "Biology provides no definition of a problem until it has been revealed by the advantage of a solution." In essence nature is a fairly lousy engineer, and it is a satisfier not an optimizer. The paper points out that the human mind might not be the pentacle of achievement comparing it to a legacy application, designed with add on. I think he is trying to compare it to Microsoft Word, I really do. He finishes this section by pondering the question what if the human mind was written for another purpose and it was adopted for its current usage only after the fact?

At this point the paper switches to intelligence in the animal community. Vervet monkeys are discussed and how they can use transitive inference to establish place in the hierarchy. The monkeys also have a rudimentary vocabulary (TIGER!!!), but they don't have language (Hey, remember that tiger, man, that thing was scary.).

Davis pontificates (overtly word, but I got nothing else) that thinking could be a form of internal visualization. He thus gives two suggestions: 1) notion of visual reasoning, reasoning with diagrams as things that we look at, whose visual nature is a central part of the representation, 2) Thinking is a form of reliving. Davis notes that sense, vision and language are not simply I/O, but part of the thought process itself. Perception can be useful for thinking. A nice quote is when Davis writes about "creating for ourselves a concrete mini-world where we carry out mental actions and then examine the results."

Davis concludes by stating that intelligence are many things (it pains me to not type "is"). AI should be the study of the design spaces of intelligences (note the plural). Thinking is visual, and diagrams are useful to reason with not just about.

Discussion

This is one of those papers that is not about understanding an algorithm. It is a decade old, but from a historical stand point it is interesting. This isn't taking anything away from what he said, it is a good read, insightful, balanced and funny. The thing is, the more he talked about visual intelligence, and the use of diagrams the only thing I could think of was "He means sketch recognition." The whole "reasoning with diagrams" seems to be fundamental to what sketch recognition hopes to accomplish. The pen is the simplest tool for getting these designs into the the system. It is more natural than using a pen-menu based system.

Citation