Have you ever wondered, what exactly distinguishes intelligent people from regular people?

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When I was young, I had a hypothesis about this. It was simply like this: “An intelligent one is capable of inferring things faster than regular people, given same data or information”. This statement was quite true for me, until now.

One day, during a class of Artificial Intelligence at my college, the professor was teaching about knowledge-based agents, a kind of learning agents which are some kind of AI agents. Since then, my perspective in intelligence had changed forever.

Before I go any further, I would like to explain to you, basically, what knowledge-based agents and learning agents are. Learning agents (you can find out what agents are in this link) are agents which can learn things by themselves. For example, you have learned that what a desk looks like, then one day, someone gives you a chair, now you can tell that it’s not a desk. This is very similar to a simple learning agent. Now, what are knowledge-based agents? Knowledge-based agents are agents which have a very specific way of learning. Usually, at first, they have a knowledge base with themselves. A knowledge base is a collection of facts called sentences. Now using these sentences, the agents can infer a new fact or facts as a conclusion and then keep them back to the knowledge base. For example, I know that (1) Jane is a daughter of Mr. and Ms. Smith, and (2) John is a son of Mr. and Ms. Smith, then from these two sentences I can tell you that Jane and John are siblings. And now my knowledge base has a new sentence like this: (3) Jane and John are siblings. That’s it for our introduction!

So, how are these things important? I remember the days when I was just a newbie in computer programming. I used to struggle with a very simple programming problem and saw my friends solved it like it was some kind of toys. One day, my friend had taught me about how he usually solve a programming problem, then I had a thought like “How could he possibly come up with this kind of methods? This is so brilliant. I surely cannot figure this out on my own”. Now get back to the day of the AI class. In that day, while the professor is saying something about knowledge base, I realized two things: one is that the method my friend taught me didn’t seem brilliant anymore, it was just okay. Another one is that maybe, just maybe, he was not as intelligent as I thought he was. Maybe he had just learned this method from others and he had used it until it became normal to him, like it is to me in these days. Maybe it has something to do with this so-called knowledge base.

This gave me an idea that maybe, how intelligent a person is, depends on not only the capability of inference, but also on how relevant and big his/her knowledge base is. For example, everyone calls Einstein a genius. But maybe he was just a man who had some sentences in his knowledge base we don’t have. I mean, if you know about relative velocity in physics, and it is the only thing you know in physics, how could you come up with something like “The speed of light is a constant, no matter how fast you are moving” (this and this).

So, that’s it for my first post. Just want to share this idea with you guys. Maybe in the future, if you see your friends doing something incredible, sometimes it just means that something in his/her knowledge base is different from yours. Don’t give up so quickly, you can always fill up your knowledge base.