It's trivial to brute-force an answer to your question: if I take $5 I'll get $5, if I take $10 I'll get $10. I prefer $10 to $5, so I take the $10. Intelligen

It's trivial to brute-force an answer to your question: if I take $5 I'll get $5, if I take $10 I'll get $10. I prefer $10 to $5, so I take the $10. Intelligence is needed when there are too many possibilities to brute-force. We need to make guesses about which actions may give better results; we have to spot patterns, generalisations and simplifications to allow re-use of previous experience; we need to identify the crucial aspects, in order to narrow down the possibilities; we need to allocate resources efficiently, and know when to give up; and so on. These are the things we would like machines to do well, but we have no satisfactory theory to explain, measure or compare such things. Introspecting our own thought patterns is not an effective way to reverse-engineer these proceses in humans, as the parent says.