Re: Integent ... Running Windows
The much-vaunted Mr. A. C. Clarke, who allegedly invented just about our entire technological base and every fictional theme that ever existed, wrote a short SF story in which a computer larger than some cities eventually managed to beat a human Grand Master at chess. The event in the tale took place sometime in the 30th Millennium or later and it was applauded as a huge deal.
When I read the tale, sometime in the early 1970's, I thought it was piffle. Tripe. Nonsense. I was entirely convinced of two things:
a: computers would consistently beat the best humans in about a decade or less, and
b: chess is *NOT* a sign of "intelligence".
I was nearly right about point "a". I am certain I'm still right about point "b". Chess, like many other simple "wargame" simulations is simply memory and extrapolation from the current position. It is no more a sign of intelligence than is a bubble-sort or a Celsius-to-Fahrenheit conversion table.
A sign of true intellect is getting utterly bored out of one's skull when first *watching* chess being played, deciding that it is simply not worth the intellectual effort to learn the rules for such a stupid, unrewarding game and buggering off to party, instead.
When machines do that we can call them AI's.
Yes, AI's are excellent at mimicking some aspects of what we generally look upon as intelligent behaviour but so are *politicians* and no one ever accused them of having any great wit.
I am firmly of the opinion that there is an ineffable quality to intelligence that binary digital machinery can not ever have. I don't know what it is, but I know it when I see it. My cat had some. My wife had masses of it but no machine I've yet seen has any.
Though I'm sure even a ten-buck toy chess-playing machine could beat me today.