[ExI] 1DIQ: an IQ metaphor to explain superintelligence

Fri Oct 24 14:32:07 UTC 2025

The case might be that the AI is simply faster than the fastest human -
actually this is a given, right? Quantitative things will favor the AI.

Now if the AI is using qualitatively different thinking unfamiliar to
humans, then that will be a mystery unless the AI can explain it.

If it can, it might not appear to us to be anything special, unless it can
be shown that the AI solved a problem humans can't.  If it can't because of
speed I don't see that as requiring anything special.

We need to quit focusing on speed.  That has been long settled. Faster is
not a higher level of thinking.  Beating humans at chess comes down to
speed, not different thinking.  We need to figure out the 'how' of the AIs
problem solving.   bill w

On Fri, Oct 24, 2025 at 9:14 AM John Clark via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>
>
> On Fri, Oct 24, 2025 at 9:21 AM Jason Resch via extropy-chat <
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
> *> If an alien superintelligence intelligence visited us, and allowed us
>> to ask it any question, we could readily determine it's computational
>> capacity by asking questions that required more and more computing power to
>> solve.*
>
>
> *Not if that alien superintelligence had found an algorithm that was more
> efficient at solving that problem than any that you know about. Or if that
> alien intelligence was part of a quantum computer that had several hundred
> logical qubits. *
>
>
> *John K Clark*
>
>
>
>
>
>
>>
>> On Fri, Oct 24, 2025, 8:49 AM Jason Resch <jasonresch at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Fri, Oct 24, 2025, 8:15 AM John Clark via extropy-chat <
>>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Thu, Oct 23, 2025 at 9:48 AM Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat <
>>>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>> *> I was addressing the terrestrial-scale scenario presented,
>>>>> not potential J-Brains (which would occupy different planets entirely).*
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> *The Guinness Book of World Records no longer recognizes a highest IQ
>>>> category because of "a lack of a universally agreed-upon standard".*
>>>>
>>> * It's easy to see why they did that, the only one who would have the
>>>> competence to write a test to find the world's smartest human would be the
>>>> world's smartest human, and that fact introduces certain
>>>> obvious difficulties.  *
>>>>
>>>
>>> You can take any set of questions, so long as they have agreed upon
>>> answers, and make an IQ test out of it: simply give the test to many people
>>> and you will find their performance fits a bell curve. This is generally
>>> true regardless of what questions you ask, so long as they're not so easy
>>> you get a cluster of perfect scores.
>>>
>>> The questions don't have to be written by someone with a higher IQ,
>>> rather, they just have to be such that there's a non-zero probability that
>>> someone won't know the answer. So the question might require specialized or
>>> esoteric knowledge, or be one that requires a lot of time to figure out
>>> (and then limit test time).
>>>
>>> So long as very high IQ people don't all get perfect scores on the test,
>>> then you can rank them, and you will find the distribution follows a bell
>>> curve.
>>>
>>>
>>>> *How could somebody with just Human intelligence even judge the
>>>> responses that a superintelligence gave on an IQ test?*
>>>>
>>>
>>> What's the capital of Benin?
>>>
>>> This is something a 100 IQ person can judge and verify the answer to,
>>> but something less than 5% of the population will know the answer to.
>>>
>>> If you have a test with a lot of questions such as these, then high or
>>> perfect scores will be extremely rare. Someone must be very well read,
>>> knowledgeable and have a great memory to do well on a test with questions
>>> such as these.
>>>
>>> To test processing speed, you can ask math questions that have well
>>> agreed answers but require many steps of processing, like multiplying 5
>>> digit numbers. Again this is a question that someone with a 100 IQ can
>>> verify, but depending on time allowed, perhaps very few people will be able
>>> to answer.
>>>
>>> Jason
>>>
>>> * Suppose the year was 1901 and one of the items on an IQ test was
>>>> "prove Fermat's Last Theorem" and suppose that somebody had given a proof
>>>> that was identical to the one that Andrew Wiles gave in 1995, how could
>>>> anybody know if it was valid? In 1901 even the world's top mathematicians
>>>> would have had no idea what Wiles was talking about because in his proof he
>>>> was using concepts without explanation, he didn't need to because they were
>>>> common knowledge to all mathematicians in 1995, but were completely unknown
>>>> to mathematicians in 1901. If Wiles had included all those explanations in
>>>> his proof then it would've been 10 times as large, and even then it
>>>> would've probably taken mathematicians at least a decade to fully
>>>> understand it and realize that Wiles was right.*
>>>>
>>>
>>
>> As to what questions we should chose to ask a super intelligence, they
>> should be questions of a type that directly measures what intelligence is
>> and requires: pattern recognition and prediction.
>>
>> You can generate random functions, then produce some sequence of outputs
>> generated by those functions, and then ask the superintelligence to
>> identify the function that produced the sequence.
>>
>> See:
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIXI
>>
>> The problem of generating functions in this way isn't difficult, nor is
>> verifying answers, both can be done mechanically and in an automated
>> fashion. But the problem of working out the function from the outputs can
>> be immensely difficult. For example, cryptographic pseudorandom number
>> generators are designed to require exponentially many steps to figure out
>> the seed value.
>>
>> If an alien superintelligence intelligence visited us, and allowed us to
>> ask it any question, we could readily determine it's computational capacity
>> by asking questions that required more and more computing power to solve.
>> Eventually there would be questions it would fail to answer due to its
>> computational limits.
>>
>> Again this doesn't require superintelligence to setup or judge these
>> difficult questions. This follows so long as "P != NP" (there are questions
>> that are computationally easy to verify the answer to, but computationally
>> hard to find.)
>>
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P_versus_NP_problem
>>
>> This is regarded as the greatest unproven problem in computer science,
>> but it is nearly universally accepted as true.
>>
>> Jason
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>>>
>>>> *John K Clark*
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> On Thu, Oct 23, 2025 at 9:32 AM John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com>
>>>>> wrote:
>>>>> >
>>>>> >
>>>>> >
>>>>> > On Thu, Oct 23, 2025 at 8:47 AM Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat <
>>>>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>>>> >
>>>>> >>  > IQ 160 AI will outthink me on average, but not always
>>>>> >
>>>>> >
>>>>> > I see no reason to believe that a smart human is about as smart as
>>>>> something can be. I also don't believe an IQ test can meaningfully measure
>>>>> the intelligence of something that is significantly smarter than the people
>>>>> who wrote the IQ test, so an IQ of 300 or even 200 means nothing. And I
>>>>> don't think there are many people who have an IQ of 160 and are in the IQ
>>>>> test writing business. But if there was such a test that could measure
>>>>> intelligence of any magnitude, and if you made a logarithmic plot of it, I
>>>>> think you'd need a microscope to see the difference between the village
>>>>> idiot and Albert Einstein, but if you were standing at the Albert Einstein
>>>>> point you'd need a telescope to see the Mr. Jupiter Brain point.
>>>>> >
>>>>> > John K Clark
>>>>> >
>>>>> >
>>>>> >
>>>>> >
>>>>> >
>>>>> >> I've been thinking about that video that claimed a
>>>>> superintelligence can always perfectly outthink any lesser intelligence,
>>>>> such as a human.  The assumption of narrative godmodding aside,
>>>>> intelligence just doesn't work like that.  I think I may have come up with
>>>>> an imperfect but simple metaphor to explain this.
>>>>> >>
>>>>> >> I have been a member of Mensa since a young age.  While it has been
>>>>> a while since my IQ was measured (and I do not trust the free online
>>>>> tests), let us say my IQ is around 150: not the record highest ever, but
>>>>> comfortably into the top 2%.  So I am speaking from the experience of
>>>>> having lived with high intelligence.
>>>>> >>
>>>>> >> In cases where just your IQ applies, it's like rolling a die, with
>>>>> sides numbered from 1 to your IQ.  (Skills and training also factor in.
>>>>> I'm nowhere near as good at fixing a car as a trained auto mechanic, for
>>>>> instance, regardless of our relative IQs.  But here we'll ne comparing me
>>>>> to hypothetical AIs where both of us have access to the same database - the
>>>>> Internet - and some training on relevant skills.)
>>>>> >>
>>>>> >> I will, on average for such matters, roll higher than someone with
>>>>> IQ 100.  This means I come up with the better answer: more efficient, more
>>>>> often correct, et cetera.  (This does not apply to subjective matters, such
>>>>> as politics, which shows one weakness of using just IQ to measure all
>>>>> intelligence, and why some speak of multiple kinds of intelligence.  But
>>>>> here we'll be looking into tactics, technology planning, and so on where
>>>>> there usually is an objectively superior answer.)
>>>>> >>
>>>>> >> But not always.  Sometimes I'll roll low and they'll roll high.  I
>>>>> know this.  Any AI that's as smart as I am, and ran for long enough to gain
>>>>> such experience, would know this too.  (The video's scenario started with
>>>>> the AI running for many subjective years.)
>>>>> >>
>>>>> >> From what I have seen, IQ may be partly about physical architecture
>>>>> but also largely depends on heuristics and optimizations: it is literally
>>>>> possible to "learn" to be smarter, especially for young children whose
>>>>> brains are still forming.  For an AI, we can map this to its hardware and
>>>>> software: a single-chip AI might be a million times smarter than an average
>>>>> human, and then run on a million GPUs.
>>>>> >>
>>>>> >> From what I have seen, IQ is not linear.  It's closer to
>>>>> log-based.  Twice as smart as me would not be IQ 300; it would be far
>>>>> closer to 151.  (I don't know if that is the exact scaling, but for this
>>>>> metaphor let's say it is.)  1,000, or 10^3, is approximately 2^10, so a
>>>>> thousand-fold increase in intelligence corresponds to a 10-point IQ
>>>>> increase by this metric.
>>>>> >>
>>>>> >> So, that "million by million" AI I just described would only be IQ
>>>>> 140.  Let's toss another million in there somewhere, or change both of
>>>>> those "million"s to "billion"s, either way getting to IQ 160.
>>>>> >>
>>>>> >> This IQ 160 AI will outthink me on average, but not always - not
>>>>> perfectly.  Further, the AI in the video wanted to be the only AI.  2% of
>>>>> humanity is in the tens of millions.  Even if we can only take our maximum
>>>>> collective roll, not adding our dice or anything, that AI will rarely
>>>>> outroll all of us - and it needs to do so several times in a row, reliably,
>>>>> in the video's scenario.  Otherwise, we figure out the AI is doing this,
>>>>> find a way to purge it, and stop its time bomb, so humanity lives.
>>>>> >>
>>>>> >> Knowing this, the AI would see its survival and growth - the
>>>>> imperatives that video assumes to explain the AI's actions - as more likely
>>>>> if it works with humanity instead of opposing it.
>>>>> >>
>>>>>
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