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Comment by visarga | Hacker News Reader

Intelligence is the ability to take decisions that lead to maximum utility, not just "good decisions". Utility is the main currency of decisions.

I found this article very interesting because it showcases the exploration/exploitation dilemma of reinforcement learning. Even a bacteria colony is a RL agent, reacting to external events in a useful way.

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"Intelligence is the ability to take decisions that lead to maximum utility"

Source? There are many definitions of intelligence, e.g. at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence

For example, a random process can find a configuration that maximizes utility. But that is not considered intelligence.

So... there is more to it.

agreed, if "good decisions" were the bar much of humanity would be struggling to qualify as intelligent :)

Utility being propagation of the species?

But by that definition, every not-yet-extinct species is intelligent. Or at least, every species that responds in any way to external environment in order to enhance survival and reproduction... which is pretty much every species.

You're assuming a binary extant/extinct dichotomy. That may work on the level of an individual species, but not on the colony level. The colony is simply attempting to propagate itself. So the utility at a given time could be given by something that measures the current size of the colony, the size of its descendants, and some estimate of how much each colony will further propagate.

Fine, but it's still a bogus use of the word "intelligence".

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