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For most of us, Slime molds are the easy low level creature in Nethack nethack.alt.org
Experiments by researchers from France's Toulouse University have shown that Slime molds seem to demonstrate learned reactions to their environment.
They used bridges leading to food sources, coated in caffeine and quinine, to show that Slime Molds appear to remember taste and evaluate toxic environments.
From the article:
"Does the behavior of slime molds constitute intelligence? Slime molds are a testament to what you can achieve when you have many simple, independent actors all working together — which is why they have been associated with some of the very same pattern-finding problems assigned to artificial neural networks, the other big example of a complex network of simple actors."
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Saturday April 30 2016, @05:34AM
Do you think human brains are running a specific type of neural network, or do you think our intelligence and experience of the world is the result of something other than that?
(Score: 2) by devlux on Saturday April 30 2016, @07:34AM
AI is like pornography. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobellis_v._Ohio [wikipedia.org]
We don't know how to define it, but we know it when we see it.
The best that we can say, is that sufficiently complex systems will begin to exhibit traits common to groups of entities that we reflect upon and say "that looks intelligent" to me.
This is why the Turing test is considered the "acid test" for AI. If you can't distinguish whether it is a human or a machine behind the keyboard, then it must be intelligent. This doesn't mean that it is at human levels of intelligence let alone superhuman levels. But it is intelligent and as 4chan shows us, we can't even be certain that most humans are at human levels of intelligence. :D
FYI this paper is a good read discussing one possible theory about how intelligence arises and before you dismiss the premise as complete crackpottery consider the author.
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1401.1219v3.pdf [arxiv.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 01 2016, @08:29AM
consider the author:
Tegmark has also formulated the "Ultimate Ensemble theory of everything", whose only postulate is that "all structures that exist mathematically exist also physically". This simple theory, with no free parameters at all, suggests that in those structures complex enough to contain self-aware substructures (SASs), these SASs will subjectively perceive themselves as existing in a physically "real" world.
Kook!
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday May 01 2016, @12:44PM
But did he specify what it means for a structure to "exist mathematically"? Does it need to have a model in ZFC set theory? Or simply in any set theory? Or does it have to be expressible in first order logic? In higher order logic? Does it require boolean logic? Or can any logic be used? If the latter, does it only exist if the truth value of "there are no contradictions" is "true", or does it suffice if this truth value is not "false"?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.