“Because Schank admits to being too optimistic in his youth, Eliezer feels free to dismiss Schank’s judgment as “sloppy futurism”, and so worth far less weight than his own analysis.”
I don’t think this comment is fair at all. You quoted Schank as saying, “It seemed a safe answer since no one could ever tell me I was wrong.” At least to my mind, when I read this I think Schank is essentially saying, “Yeah, I’ll admit it, I was doing sloppy futurism because I figured I could get away with it.” In which case, accusing him of being a “sloppy futurist” doesn’t seem unwarranted.
@ mitchell porter:
″...to compare its performance, not just across different environments, but when presented with different utility functions.”
If you look at my formal definition of “environments” in my universal intelligence paper I actually take into account all utility functions, and also all temporal preference functions. Essentially these are built into the environments.
@ Unknown:
“I think the No Free Lunch theorems of Wolpert and Macready imply that if you take two EUMs and average their results over all possible problems, the two will be necessarily indistinguishable. So your measure of intelligence would imply that unequal general intelligence is impossible.”
Yes, that is what would happen if you simply took the expectation with respect to a uniform distribution over the environments. However, if you take an Occam’s Razor prior, such as the algorithmic probability prior used in Solomonoff induction extended to environments (as done by Hutter), then the NFL theorems no longer hold. This is the reason why my mathematical definition of universal intelligence doesn’t have the problem you describe.
@ Robin Hanson:
“Because Schank admits to being too optimistic in his youth, Eliezer feels free to dismiss Schank’s judgment as “sloppy futurism”, and so worth far less weight than his own analysis.”
I don’t think this comment is fair at all. You quoted Schank as saying, “It seemed a safe answer since no one could ever tell me I was wrong.” At least to my mind, when I read this I think Schank is essentially saying, “Yeah, I’ll admit it, I was doing sloppy futurism because I figured I could get away with it.” In which case, accusing him of being a “sloppy futurist” doesn’t seem unwarranted.
@ mitchell porter:
″...to compare its performance, not just across different environments, but when presented with different utility functions.”
If you look at my formal definition of “environments” in my universal intelligence paper I actually take into account all utility functions, and also all temporal preference functions. Essentially these are built into the environments.
@ Unknown:
“I think the No Free Lunch theorems of Wolpert and Macready imply that if you take two EUMs and average their results over all possible problems, the two will be necessarily indistinguishable. So your measure of intelligence would imply that unequal general intelligence is impossible.”
Yes, that is what would happen if you simply took the expectation with respect to a uniform distribution over the environments. However, if you take an Occam’s Razor prior, such as the algorithmic probability prior used in Solomonoff induction extended to environments (as done by Hutter), then the NFL theorems no longer hold. This is the reason why my mathematical definition of universal intelligence doesn’t have the problem you describe.