And I do think this research is going to take us there; what is winning a game more than translating your enemy actions into yours? Like translating a face gesture on a poker game (or translating a word) into a action such as doubling inside the game (or a http response).
Cats aren't as intelligent as dogs, and they aren't social animals but they have some intelligence. They can learn on their own to navigate surroundings, move, catch prey and mate.
I'd love to see Watson do any of these without pre programming.
I'd love to see a Human do anything without any kind of pre programming(I mean without giving it the knowledge and training it to use that knowledge).
If I take a tribal person from a amazon jungle who hasn't seen the outside world ever and disclose him the rules of playing chess, will he able to play as well as Gary Kasparov in a few minutes? Or if say I disclose the usage of a paint brush and paint, can he paint like Michelangelo or Da Vinci?
Each human is a self learning self programming machine.
Humans, including us can do so many things only because our brains are getting programmed with information every single moment and are being told how to act on that information.
In same manner, if you take Watson and for example change format of questions (they are still asked in plain English, just rephrased) and way Daily bonus prize functions, he won't be able to function without some human coming in and tweaking it.
You generally don't have to open head of a human, rewire their brains and then send them to do another task. They adapt. Autonomously. It's like if software could auto investigate sites for weather API and adapt to it, instead of having a human come and rewire API adapters.
You haven't spent much time around cats (or haven't paid attention) if you think they aren't social animals.
Our various cats when I grew up would bring "friends" around - cats of both genders that they played with, and who would be allowed into our garden. Some of them were "introduced" to us - our cat would walk up to us with his friend in tow and stay until we'd pet his friend.
You'd often find them lying on our patio together during the summer. They'd also occasionally groom each other.
Our current neighbours oldest male cat sometimes "walks" the two young cats she recently got around the neighbourhood.
Humans kinda forced the whole social aspect of their lives. I read somewhere that cat holding tail upward is a new construct of cats. It's usually used by kittens around their momma.
The behavior you describe is more unique. Here where I am two cats are no way likely to sleep near each other. Basically they might sleep at least two feet distance. Most contacts are violent.
Either way, people claiming that either dogs or cats aren't very inteligent haven't lived with one. It is true that it is not human intelligence, but personally I feel that the only piece missing is natural language, which if you think about it is the only distinctive trait separating us from primates.
And this will be the ultimate test for AI, the ability of a computer to have a meaningful conversation with a human.
Dogs can fake emotion (ever been bitten by a dog that waggles his tail?), know what appeals to humans(sending cutest or most wounded pup to beg for food), understand how subway works, etc. Cats have greater independence, but overall aren't as clever.
Crows and killer whales, now those fuckers are intelligent.
The only thing exceptional about human mind is the ability to be EXTREME in every aspects of our mind. Most creatures can do same as we, but we do it to a higher degree.
On the human mind, I do have a problem with assertions such as yours - saying that we can be "extreme" doesn't say much about how we are built or why other animals can't do it. We definitely don't have the biggest brains.
Sometime in the evolutionary process, we developed the ability to speak. Chimpanzees have symbolic capacities which are rarely used in the wild. Something happened to us, some social change and we've been practicing this ability since tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago.
And speech is tremendously important because that's how we learn - we pass and receive knowledge to and from others by means of natural language. Society also leaped forward along with agriculture because that's when written language happened, also allowing us to pass knowledge to future generations. We also leaped forward when common people started learning to read. And because of the ease of access to information nowadays, I also believe we're amidst another revolution.
Now if you look at animals, they do have language. Most intelligent animals rely on body language and even sounds to communicate. But one thing that we do effortlessly is to invent new words, new metaphors to describe whatever we want and our language has gotten so big that we can describe anything.
So there's a strong correlation there and the question on my mind is - are we smart because of the ability to communicate, or are we able to communicate because we are smart?
Chimpanzees and crows can make tools, we make tools that make tools that make tools.
Animals have language(s), we have several highly symbolic languages. Ours is just more sophisticated.
I'm pretty sure there are examples of animals empathizing, humans can empathize with a large part of biosphere.
There is nothing that fundamentally divides us. Or you can say that humans are nothing special. It's just we have more most mental tasks at greater lengths and do it more consistently. That's all.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SH3bADiB7uQ
Edit: The speaker was Jan Peters at ECML/PKDD13
also, by some of these definitions, sounds like my roomba approaches natural intelligence.
They are not pre-programmed to fight no more they are pre-programmed to open doors.
As for roomba, depends if you caught it fighting or mating with other roomba's ;)
On the subject of the "game" of fetch - it turns out that dogs can actually show some fairly sophisticated behavior when playing fetch:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetch_%28game%29
[NB They are Burmese - quite dog like cats and still behaving like overgrown kittens even though they are 8 years old.]
If it couldn't do these things, then it was in no way intelligent, because it was not analyzing at a conceptual level. Programs that simply optimize data towards a set of target characteristics are clever, but not intelligent. Hofstadter goes into this in the article.
You're making exactly the same mistake those over-optimistic AI researchers made back in the 60s. They created some whiz-bang optimisation algorithms and thought general purpose AI must be just around the corner, but it turns out that actual conceptual analysis and reasoning is a completely different and fundamentally unrelated problem.
Right, but playing jeopardy is far more general than instructing a computer to sort an array, so why do you think that we are on the wrong path?
As Hofstadter explains in the article, far better than I could, these applications are not contributing to progress in developing software that understands the data it is manipulating. I recommend reading the article, or even better GEB itself, it's very illuminating.