DynaPsych Table of Contents

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Toward a General Theory of General Intelligence

Ben Goertzel


February 2009





This series of three interlinked papers sketches a novel general theory of general intelligence, and indicates its potential application to AI design. Click on the titles to see the papers in PDF format.

• The Embodied Communication Prior: A Characterization of General Intelligence in the Context of Embodied Social Interaction: We outline a general conceptual definition of real-world general intelligence that avoids the twin pitfalls of excessive mathematical generality, and excessive anthropomorphism.. Drawing on prior literature, a definition of general intelligence is given, which defines the latter by reference to an assumed measure of the simplicity of goals and environments. The novel contribution presented is to gauge the simplicity of an entity in terms of the ease of communicating it within a community of embodied agents (the so-called Embodied Communication Prior or ECP). Augmented by some further assumptions about the statistical structure of communicated knowledge, this choice is seen to lead to a model of intelligence in terms of distinct but interacting memory and cognitive subsystems dealing with procedural, declarative, sensory/episodic, attentional and intentional knowledge. A sister paper then extends these ideas to yield a “Cognitive Synergy Theory” that suggests specific conclusions for the architecture of artificial general intelligences, based on the ECP.
• Cognitive Synergy: A Universal Principle for General Intelligence?: Do there exist general principles, which any system must obey in order to achieve advanced general intelligence using feasible computational resources? Here we propose one candidate: “cognitive synergy,” a principle which suggests that general intelligences must contain different knowledge creation mechanisms corresponding to different sorts of memory (declarative, procedural, sensory/episodic, attentional, intentional); and that these different mechanisms must be interconnected in such a way as to aid each other in overcoming memory-type-specific combinatorial explosions.
• OpenCogPrime: A Cognitive Synergy Based Architecture for General Intelligence: OpenCogPrime (OCP), a comprehensive architecture for artificial general intelligence (AGI) is briefly overviewed. Aimed in the long term at AGI at the human level and beyond, the current partial implementation of OCP is being used for applications such as controlling virtual pets in virtual worlds and inferring novel conclusions from sets of semantic relations extracted from natural language. The key aspects of OCP are described here in the context of the theoretical foundation of “cognitive synergy theory”; and the current implementation status is briefly reviewed.