HOW intelligent are you? It’s a question psychologists often ask but now two
mathematicians argue that it’s meaningless. They say their experiments with
computer “minibrains” prove that intelligence depends on the environment and
cannot exist independently of it. The work has reignited a fierce debate on the
nature of intelligence.
Per Bak and Joe Wakeling from Imperial College in London pitted simple neural
network agents known as minibrains against each other in a game in which they
had to choose one of two groups to join. To win, they had to join the least
popular group.
A memory of previous…
