The skill of learning skills.

JGCASEY wrote: 
So maybe it is more than just adding skills, maybe
it is adding a particular type of skill. Maybe a
skill for adding skills? That is the ability to learn
how to do things all by itself as a result of some
internal needs and experience with its "world".

If we define intelligence as the skill of learning skills, we arrive at a gradual definition for intelligence. It is easy to see how a system may be capable of learning some kinds of skills but not others. The breadth/variety of learnable skills and their relevance to achieving the program's goal determines the degree of intelligence.

Now we need to define a skill, skill variety, and what exactly we mean by learning a skill. If we think of a skill as a state operator...:

* A skill is a procedure for inducing something to transition from one state to another. In other words, a set of instructions which the system is capable of following that predictably produces certain changes in the environment.

* A skill can be of any level of coarseness. We don't necessarily need to specify every action in detail. We can imagine abstract skills such as "drive a car" and reason with them without referring to sub-skills ("start the car").

* The definition of having learned a skill is trivial in this case--either the system can or cannot carry out the procedure. We don't necessarily need to constrain how the system carries out or acquires procedures.

* The power of a system can be measured in terms of the range of goals it is capable of achieving compared with the theoretical range of goals a system with the same inputs/outputs could possibly achieve.

* The intelligence of a system can be measured in terms of the range of skills it is capable of acquiring compared to the range of skills theoretically possible for it to perform. The intelligence of a system is its capacity for increasing its power over the environment.

Curiously, with this definition a static skill set would imply that the intelligence of a system decreases as its power increases. Only learning skills which expand the potential skill set of a system increase its intelligence.

An intelligent system would only require processing power to match human intelligence for time-constrained tasks. If we limit the domain of problems to non-timed goals, there is no reason at least a marginally intelligent system could not be built on a home PC today.

-- Risujin
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