>> On Tue, 06 May 2008 03:52:01 GMT, Kenneth P. Turvey wrote:

>>> On Tue, 29 Apr 2008 10:40:53 +0000, Dmitry A. Kazakov wrote:

>>> Second, since we know how long it has taken humans to evolve, we can
>>> develop at least a general idea of the likely complexity of the
>>> problem.

>> No, because the medium is different. For example, it is known,
>> statistically, how long it would take for silicon atoms to form a
>> transistor through thermodynamic movement of particles. That does not
>> estimate the complexity of producing Pentium IV chips.

> It certainly puts an upper limit on it, which is what I was saying.  

> So you can learn nothing from statistics?  

>>> Ok, to me this is silly.  Just my opinion.  If it was not computable,
>>> then our brain clearly couldn't compute it.

>> This is a different thing. Real-time clock is incomputable, yet any
>> modern CPU has it. The very idea of an incomputable element is to
>> compute something, which cannot be computed otherwise.

> This just doesn't follow your assertion above.  

>>> We can state it as an optimization problem already.  We do it all the
>>> time.  That's what standardized testing is all about.  We do it in many
>>> other ways too.  When you got your drivers license you passed a small
>>> portion of a human intelligence test.  We could very easily put
>>> together 100 of these and come up with a metric for what it means to
>>> have roughly human level intelligence.  Not only would it not be hard,
>>> most of the work would already have been done.

>> That is not enough. You have to show existence of an optimum, or at
>> least a countable number of local optimums.

> We know that human level intelligence exists.

>> It is possible that a scientific definition does work (impracticable),
>> but an unscientific one certainly doesn't.

> So the fact that I can give you a good metric isn't sufficient?