Universal Intelligence: A Definition of Machine Intelligence

A fundamental problem in artificial intelligence is that nobody really knows what intelligence is. The problem is especially acute when the authors need to consider artificial systems which are significantly different to humans. In this paper they approach this problem in the following way: They take a number of well known informal definitions of human intelligence that have been given by experts, and extract their essential features. These are then mathematically formalised to produce a general measure of intelligence for arbitrary machines. They believe that this equation formally captures the concept of machine intelligence in the broadest reasonable sense.