Thought it will be a good idea to share with others and get their opinion on this.
In this article, I will be referring to intelligence as behavior, actions of humans broadly. Humans are no doubt the most intelligent living beings on earth as we have been successful in disturbing the balance of nature resulting in too many humans on earth and many endangered species. So what makes us smarter than the other species is our complex brain. Researchers have not been successful till date to develop a unified theory for brain or intelligence. In the following sections I summarize some of the facts I learnt from literature and my views about the debatable questions.
About the Human Brain
Breaking down intelligence into constituents I believe is impossible. But the ability to store, process, imagine, communicate do contribute to intelligence. The book Phantoms in the Brain by V.S. Ramachandran is a very good attempt to explain some functionalities of brain. The brain is divided into different regions and each part of body is mapped to some region of the brain. Brain is basically a neural network with about 100 billions neurons. The connectivity/interaction between these neurons determines the human behavior. The neural network is not static as the neurons and the connectivity keep changing. The neural network also adapts to things we do repeatedly and so we get better at things by practice. So can all the functionalities of the human brain broken down to logical rules ? Specifically , can we have a mapping from a set of input to a set of outputs? I will say No. I think some part of it is random. Like we may behave differently in two exactly same situations. Cutting out the random part, can we theoretically synthesize intelligence by logical rules? I think it is possible but not practical because the variable space will be too large. In the next section I discuss the approaches to model intelligence on computers.
Research in Artificial Intelligence
The field of Artificial Intelligence tries to make computers work like humans do. The two main approaches to model human intelligence are:
- Knowledge-based
- Behavior-based
Both these approaches cannot independently capture the essence of intelligence. Theoretically, knowledge-based approach is the right way to go once we are successful in simulating the neuron behavior on a computer. But we do not exactly know the working, connectivity of neurons as yet. So designing application specific systems based on the behavior-based approach or a combined strategy seems like a fruitful approach to add some levels of intelligence to computers.
