Shane Legg and Marcus Hutter of IDSIA did some recent work on a metric for machine intelligence. ( http://www.vetta.org/documents/ui_benelearn.pdf http://www.ve

Shane Legg and Marcus Hutter of IDSIA did some recent work on a metric for machine intelligence. ( http://www.vetta.org/documents/ui_benelearn.pdf http://www.vetta.org/documents/ui_benelearn.pdf ) Marcus Hutter's PhD thesis produced a theory of "Universal Artificial Intelligence" called "AIXI" based on Solomonoff induction. Sadly, AIXI is incomputable, and the time and space bounded version "AIXItl" is still impractical. http://www.hutter1.net/ai/aixigentle.htm http://www.hutter1.net/ai/aixigentle.htm But you're right: we don't know much about intelligence nor how it should be embodied on a computer. This is why we should encourage some really smart people to focus on the problem! I sincerely think this is an area that would yield to research. Might take a long time and a lot of brainpower though... Lenat's Eurisko is pretty cool, and I don't know much about it, but it doesn't sound like Eurisko is as general as is needed.