On more realistic environment distributions for defining, evaluating and developing intelligence

Abstract

One insightful view of the notion of intelligence is the ability to perform well in a diverse set of tasks, problems or environments. One of the key issues is therefore the choice of this set, which can be formalised as a 'distribution'. Formalising and properly defining this distribution is an important challenge to understand what intelligence is and to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI). In this paper, we agree with previous criticisms that a universal distribution using a reference universal Turing machine (UTM) over tasks, environments, etc., is perhaps a much too general distribution, since, e.g., the probability of other agents appearing on the scene or having some social interaction is almost 0 for many reference UTMs. Instead, we propose the notion of Darwin-Wallace distribution for environments, which is inspired by biological evolution, artificial life and evolutionary computation. However, although enlightening about where and how intelligence should excel, this distribution has so many options and is uncomputable in so many ways that we certainly need a more practical alternative. We propose the use of intelligence tests over multi-agent systems, in such a way that agents with a certified level of intelligence at a certain degree are used to construct the tests for the next degree. This constructive methodology can then be used as a more realistic intelligence test and also as a testbed for developing and evaluating AGI systems. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.