> I don't think the essence is especially elusive. It's the ability to make novel, meaningful, and useful discoveries from precepts that don't immediately "obviously" lead to those discoveries.
But that's trivial simply by enumerating all Turing machines that reproduces the observed outputs. The point of intelligence is that it somehow "filters" the space of possible theories in some specific, computable way.
The ideal model of this is Solomonoff induction, which orders Turing machines by Kolmogorov complexity, but that ordering is not computable. So intelligence is some computable approximation of this, but discovering the specifics of how that works is non-trivial.
I would define intelligence not in terms of search, but creation. And the two are indeed different. As one simple example - early man had no concept of math, or even numbers. Incidentally, the same is even true of some isolated tribes to this day [1]. Somehow we created numbers, seemingly from nothing. And it was only this creation that enabled us to move onto even more creation where the search space continues to grow ever wider, yet we continue to pull something from nothing. It's not like we had any real basis for the formulation of numbers, or even reason to imagine they existed.
The further you go back in our development, the greater the distinction between creation and search becomes. The article itself even gets into a bit of a paradox on this note. It suggests that language defines thought, and since they have no numbers in their language - they cannot think about numbers. But then how do we have numbers? Somebody was certainly able to, and it's not because they started with numbers in their language. And for that matter how do we even have language? Another thing that was developed from absolutely nothing. Go for enough back in our evolutionary timeline and we wouldn't have even had the ability to express e.g. 'angry noise'. Yet somehow, we created such things - again seemingly from nothing. And I think that is the purest essence of intelligence.
But everything expressible by humans is expressible by a Turing machine, so there is no fundamental difference between search and creation since Turing machines are recursively enumerable.
We didn't create numbers seemingly from nothing, it was necessary to track our food and our children or family. Even crows have the ability to count.
Again, read the paper. Numbers were thought to be an intuitive concept - they are not, not even amongst humans. One needs not numbers to keep track of their family or food anymore than they need calculus to say, "Wow that thing's speeding up." They have "one", "two", and "many" and that works for all their purposes.
Basically look to any example, where what is discovered is not a recombination of preexisting knowledge but the emergence of new knowledge and you'll find search is pointless. As an example, consider hand washing. Now a days we all intuit that hand washing is a good way to prevent the spread of disease. But of course that intuition is because we all know of and accept a germ based theory of disease. A couple of hundred years ago this was not true. Go a little further back and the concept of germs did not even exist. And so surgeons did not regularly wash their hands even before doing things like surgery.
Now I challenge you to, even in wildly hand-wavey fashion, to describe the creation of a turing machine that could, from the basis of knowledge of an individual of such times, "discover" the secret of hand washing. There were no records kept on hand washing : illness rates or anything of the sort, because nobody even stopped to consider the impact it might be having.
The difficulty you're going to face here is that there is no preexisting knowledge to draw upon. You are not "searching" for an answer, but having to create it, seemingly from nothing.
> Again, read the paper. Numbers were thought to be an intuitive concept - they are not, not even amongst humans.
Your link doesn't prove anything, it contains testimony from experts arguing both sides. Odd that you think one side is automatically correct from one study that was inconclusive and a clear example of an exception to the rule, at best.
> Basically look to any example, where what is discovered is not a recombination of preexisting knowledge but the emergence of new knowledge and you'll find search is pointless
I think you'll find it much harder to argue this point than you think. Most such discoveries result from simple observations of the world, so the information was already out there, people just didn't notice it before.
> Now I challenge you to, even in wildly hand-wavey fashion, to describe the creation of a turing machine that could, from the basis of knowledge of an individual of such times, "discover" the secret of hand washing
Exactly the way it happened: someone noticed that fewer people died in hospitals where the doctors washed their hands after performing autopsies. The scientific process is reliable because it's mechanistic, repeatable. All scientific knowledge derives from simple, repeatable observations like this.
The closest thing you'll find to true invention is maybe math and various logics. But even then, this is often simply a process of permuting existing axioms, and adding a new randomly generated axiom to see if anything interesting haopens. This is a search process, most of whose results will be internally inconsistent and so get discarded quickly by the human mind with it's effective pattern matching.
Hand washing records were not kept for the same reason I've mentioned multiple times - nobody ever thought it relevant, so it wasn't considered relevant. So it's not like you can simply search the records for something which does not exist! Even when one doctor finally did discover the value of handwashing, through a remarkable degree of serendipity, his hypothesis, based on anecdotal evidence, was rejected because it did not line up with scientific thought of the time. He ended up in an insane asylum and died. Like a Greek tragedy, his cause of death was an infected wound on his hand, very possibly caused by excessive washing! [1]
So now we return to the same question. How do you expect a machine to simply discover the value of hand washing? Let alone carry out tests? You have no data on hand washing whatsoever as it's not seen as relevant. It's a rather random hypothesis that, given the knowledge of the time, would have less than zero basis for support. There is no logical reason for its discovery, nor ought it ever be prioritized highly in any way whatsoever.
And this is, in many ways, the rule more than the exception for discovery.
On the numbers issue. I was not referring to "views" but facts. The tribesmen had terms only for 1, 2, and many. And while the article doesn't mention it, it's safe to assume they have 0 systems of mathematics. Assuming they are not uniquely retarded, we were all in a similarly limited state of understanding at some point. Searching for where we are, from the state of where they are, will yield no results. Yet somehow, we achieved it.
But that's trivial simply by enumerating all Turing machines that reproduces the observed outputs. The point of intelligence is that it somehow "filters" the space of possible theories in some specific, computable way.
The ideal model of this is Solomonoff induction, which orders Turing machines by Kolmogorov complexity, but that ordering is not computable. So intelligence is some computable approximation of this, but discovering the specifics of how that works is non-trivial.