The Intelligent Use of Intelligent Systems

Abstract

There is one main problem in defining what an intelligent system is: there are no good definitions of intelligence. There is generally more agreement on the behaviours referred to by the term (the phenomenology of intelligence) than there is on how they can be interpreted or categorised. In psychology, intelligence can be defined either as the general cognitive ability underlying all processes of complex reasoning, or as the performance on tests of intelligence - to mention two extremes. It is therefore not sufficient to define an intelligent system with reference to human intelligence. An alternative is to focus on the salient aspects of intelligent performance and refer to a cognitive system as follows [1]:

“A cognitive system produces “intelligent action”, that is, its behavior is goal oriented, based on symbol manipulation and uses knowledge of the world (heuristic knowledge) for guidance. Furthermore, a cognitive system is adaptive and able to view a problem in more than one way. A cognitive system operates using knowledge about itself and the environment, in the sense that it is able to plan and modify its actions on the basis of that knowledge. It is thus not only data driven but also concept driven.”