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Comment by goodtraveler | Hacker News Reader

And yet none of these systems can do anything beyond generating statistical patterns adapted to our visual sense. It's certainly a worthwhile achievement but I have yet to see anyone make a convincing case that there is a way to scale these systems to anything resembling intelligence. My current test for whether these systems are showing us how intelligence actually works in the human brain is a convincing proof of Cauchy's integral formula and I'm certain this benchmark will remain unsolved for the foreseeable future.

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Why would your benchmark for intelligence in the human brain be something that less than 1% of humans are capable of achieving? To me that type mathematical proof is an example of a very specific type of intelligence rather than general intelligence.

Because if an algorithm is capable of setting up the conceptual machinery for making sense of and explaining Cauchy's integral formula then that algorithm is revealing something about the structure of the human brain and as such it would be a good benchmark for understanding how human intelligence actually works (not just in the 1% of people). Moreover, mathematics is a fantastic proving ground for testing algorithms that purport to explain symbolic intelligence because if something can not work in a mathematical setting/context then there is no hope it will ever work in the real world since real world intelligence is much more than symbol shuffling. Cauchy's integral formula is a reasonable proxy for proving understanding of symbolic systems and not just juggling their statistical properties/associations.

If you think that Cauchy's integral formula is too complicated then there are probably simpler problems that would also serve as reasonable proxies of symbolic understanding, e.g. elementary group theory and linear algebra.

Could you give a simple example of proof that real world since real world intelligence is much more than symbol shuffling? I'm a bit unfamiliar with the idea.

I don't appreciate the sarcasm. If you're confused then say so, save the snark for someone else. If you're asking a sincere question then you can go outside and watch a few animals navigate the world. Squirrels are a good one, as are crows and ravens. Or as the kids say these days, you should touch some real grass instead of virtual ones.

It was a genuine question, I've not heard an intuitive or simple explanation of the concept. Your assumed combative tone is very reminiscent of others I've heard bring up the concept though (like Gary Marcus). I still haven't been able to hear a good and simple explanation though from your cohort despite my genuine curiosity.

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