January 29, 2019 Tuesday
Bedtime Story
Intelligence
The intelligence is more in the technical
sense and not in general sense as we commonly understand it though I am quite
sure most of us really do not understand what intelligence is.
In fact different learned people often come
out with different definitions of intelligence though in general they all agree
that intelligence “among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan,
solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and
learn from experience.”
Considering this definition it becomes quite
apparently a dubious proposition to consider all apes as intelligent.
Lot of learned men also agree that
intelligence does NOT pertain to “merely book learning, a narrow academic
skill, or test-taking smarts”.
And all the while for almost forty five or
so years I revered men who fell and excelled in the second category and not the
first (though I have a feeling that those belonging to the first category are
hard to come by since they are genuinely rare and few).
To the mathematicians and computer
scientists who had gathered at the Dartmouth College it was transparent that
humans were machines and humans could be intelligent that machines too could in
principle be made to be intelligent.
This Dartmouth is the same Ivy League
Dartmouth College located in Hanover, New Hampshire which arguably is the least
famous of the eight private Ivy League Universities located in the north-Eastern
United States.
Solomonoff is most famous as the inventor
of algorithmic probability which arose as a fusion of four ideas that were in
some sort mutually incompatible or at least disparate:
(1) Occam’s razor
(2) Epicurus’ principle of multiple
explanations – which states that if more than one theory is consistent with the
observations, keep all such theories.
(3) Universal Turing Machine
(4) Bayes’ rule for prediction
Two of these you should be well aware of if
you follow my bedtime stories.
The other two we can keep it for
later.
For now we shall return to Semmelweis and
see what happened to his preposterous theory of “cadaverous particles”.
Semmelweis was not the one to stay quiet
because he felt had he had sufficient evidence in hand (pun intended) to
initiate some sort of preventive action.
He immediately initiated a policy for
doctors and medical students of washing hands after the autopsy work and before
proceeding to the obstetrics department for delivery.
Instead of normal soap and water he
proposed chlorinated lime or calcium hypochlorite which is the main ingredient
of bleaching powder.
Today it is commonly used as an agent to
sanitize public swimming pools and disinfect drinking water.
Stay tuned to the voice of an
average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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