What Is Intelligence?

Intelligences are varied, but the most widely accepted definition of intelligence is the ability to acquire and apply knowledge. It's a rather vague definition, which doesn't tell us much about what this intelligence looks like. A better way to understand it is that intelligence is the ability to accomplish complex goals in complex environments.

Research

Human intelligence

We don't know specifically what happens in the brain to give us intelligence, but there are a few things we do know. The first is that we have two hemispheres, which seems to help. The second is that the environment people experience gets mapped onto their brain using a mechanism known as Hebbian learning – this allows human brains to keep a map of how important things are not only for themselves, but for other humans as well. This leads to really interesting forms of social bonding that don't exist in any other species on earth; it's something we take for granted as humans, but it's not obvious why the rest of the animal kingdom doesn't share these abilities.

Cloud Server Storage

Artificial Intelligence has many definitions, which have changed over time. It's an amorphous concept that can mean a lot of things to different people. Mostly, it comes down to the ability to think intelligently. Humans can think intelligently, and so can many other animals. AI is the attempt to create something that can think intelligently in a way that is qualitatively indistinguishable from humans. A computer, for example, can try to learn many different things, but it can not learn about its own learning – this is what makes computers so hard to work with. Learning-focused AI tries to make computers that have a better ability to comprehend their own intellects.

Knowledge

Knowledge is often useful in accomplishing goals, but it's not the same thing as intelligence.

Server

A computer server is a device that provides computer services to other computers over a network – usually the internet. Our servers are mostly used for hosting and researching neural nets.

Cloud

The cloud is a way of accessing computer storage and computational power over the internet.