GeoTheo

Naahh,
Then I would be a Genius-If matching external patterns internally was the ultimate measure of intelligence. Theres lots of people smarter than me.

Tom Sawyer

I've always liked the definition that intelligence measn that you agree with me.

Think of having a big database with all the knowledge in the world in it, but no intelligence woudl result from that. The ability to process that knowledge and relate it to other events and make assumptions based on it would signify intelligence, though. So, I'd say that intelligence means the ability to use knowledge. The two are inter-realated. If you have all the knowledge, but are unable to do anything with it would signify a lack of intelligence; if you are intelligent but don't have sufficient knowledge, you'll do stupid things because you don't have the sufficient resources to base your judgements on.

Kharakov

The degree of complexity and the number of patterns you can accurately recognize and reproduce shows the measure of your intelligence. The greatest scientists just notice and describe (reproduce to share with others) patterns that other people haven't comprehended yet.

-k

excreationist

Well I think there are at least 2 kinds of patterns... ones that involve no goal - e.g. trees usually have green leaves - and ones that do. That kind would involve generalized problem solving strategies - this is what logical thinking is about. e.g. if x->y and y, x *might* be the case. We aren't necessarily aware of these things as explicit formal logic statements though - perhaps just as "intuitions".
People can also learn a thing which has recently been called "nonmonotonic reasoning". And there's also probabilistic reasioning. Those things are mentioned in AI textbooks.
Basically nonmonotic reasoning is about subclasses (e.g. specific birds) inheriting the generalized characteristics of the class (e.g. they have feathers, are fairly small, fly, etc) and that there are exceptions to this inheritance, and exceptions to exceptions, etc.
e.g. (normal) birds fly, and ostriches are birds. But ostriches don't fly. Fred is an ostrich, therefore he doesn't fly and he's a bird. There could be exceptions though - e.g. he could be flying in a plane. (I got this one from a textbook)
This non-monotonic reasoning framework would also be a learnt pattern... so we learn that just because x is said to have properties a, b and c it doesn't mean that all x's have this...

Intelligence not only means applying efficient problem-solving strategies (patterns) - it also means learning and applying (projecting) new patterns... and this means that the person should be good at learning new patterns (having good problem-solving strategies would help) and also able to modify existing patterns. (To be aware of assumptions and discard them if necessary) Another thing would be to be creative... this just involves using the goal to trigger off many different approaches (generalized problem-solving strategies).

[ July 18, 2002: Message edited by: excreationist ]</p>