[extropy-chat] Extreme Intelligence

[Russell Wallace]

On 8/4/06, Lee Corbin <lcorbin at tsoft.com> wrote:
>
> If you and Russell are right in your negative assessments, that in
> itself is quite remarkable: To wit, that no matter how intelligent a
> human being could be, it would not be possible for him to complete this
> task in the allotted time. (Almost every sentence with a "no matter how"
> or an "every" is pretty remarkable, if true.)


No matter how intelligent a human being could be, it would not be possible
for him to summon a demon by chanting words in Latin, determine the Earth's
velocity relative to the luminiferous ether, foretell your future from your
star sign, mold granite with his bare hands, or transform a road into a toad
by changing the first letter of its name. Do you find these statements
remarkable?

Consider the admittedly far more abstract task of outlining a proof
> of Fermat's Last Theorem that human mathematicians of 1970 could
> have used to construct an actual proof. I dare say that there exists
> a two-page description that the 1970 mathematicians could have read
> and understood, a description that would have allowed them a straight
> path to a proof along the 1994 lines that they could have implemented
> in a few months.


I dare say there exists such, too. Wouldn't surprise me if an IQ 300
mathematician starting in 1970 could have found it by 1971, even. Finding a
proof of Fermat's Last Theorem is, after all, in the NP category - that is,
at the most trivial difficulty level. That says nothing about how hard
problems must be solved.

But I do think that there exists a 15,000 word outline of how to build
> a nuclear power plant. So you are saying that no conceivable human would
> likely stumble upon that description.


There does indeed exist a short description of how to build a nuclear power
plant. There does not exist a short description of how to magically generate
or verify such by pure armchair thought, because that's not a property of
the words; it's a property of the real world, so there's no substitute for
actually doing the lab work.
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