Introduction

This piece seeks to explore an interesting way of defining intelligent systems such that we can theoretically quantify their general intelligence. From this, further tools and ideas for comparing these entities could be developed. The definitions are not meant to be philosophical truths, rather they are meant to be useful tools that will allow us to analyse and gain insight into these systems and how they relate to one another. At least that's the hope, failing that they can perhaps at least provide some food for thought.

This post is meant to be accessible to non-technical readers so some terms may be explained to a level of detail unnecessary for people familiar with machine learning.

Desirable Properties

We begin by identifying several desired properties that would increase the utility and robustness of our framework, giving us something to aim at.

Sufficient: If our definitions relied upon, or referenced, things that are poorly defined themselves, we would just be moving the problem back a step and not actually gaining any insight.

Measurable: Intelligence is a broad spectrum, this especially visible in the natural world. A good definition would reflect this and give us a continuous measure of intelligence that allows sensible comparisons.

Implementation Independent: It's easy to compare somethings capabilities to humans in order to ascertain their intelligence. We want our definitions to be free from bias towards any particular implementation or version of intelligence, so that it can recognise intelligence which operates in a way unfamiliar to us, or in a way we don't understand.

Minimal Grey Areas: Many definitions could leave large grey areas on boundaries between classifications, or not make sense when applied to domains they were not designed with in mind. This should be avoided.

Useable: Sometimes a seemingly 'perfect' definition is infeasible to actually apply, and so is of no practical use. A definition which is infeasible to theoretically calculate, could have a method to estimate it. Quantifying how reliable or accurate the estimates are would also be useful.

Agents

A classic definition of an agent is something that interacts with an environment, choosing an action (or actions), to achieve some desired goal. To make this rigorous, we will define an agent in our framework as something that produces an action based on the state of its env...

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