Human Intelligence and Current Artificial Intelligence

I've take Pat Langley's cognitive system class this semester.

My feeling of intelligence is rather vague.

What's intelligence? If a system is complicated enough, is that intelligent? What should be a component of an intelligence? Like Deep Blue, is that intelligence. I guess most people won't vote for intelligence. Now, people are trying to develop a meta-game player, which can automatically train itself as long as the rules of the game are given. Is that intelligent? No. Human beings are actually open-minded. Yep, machines can outperform human beings in one field, but they can never be "artificial intelligence". That's why I feel AI would never come true in my life. But I agree with Pat that more focus should be on the nature of mind.

For a long time, I've been thinking that the brain and a machine's difference is mainly due to the hardware difference (brain's processing speed is low, memory is limited, but highly parallel). Like playing chess, planning, scheduling, while machines can do an exhaustive search, or deeper search, human beings try to prune a lot of branches in each step (I guess there should be some pattern recognition involved). It's more like beam-search, as I think. The problem for efficient processing is how to extract those useful patterns.

Until recently, Pat mentioned this paper:
The magic of 7 +/- 2
which tries to understand why human beings did a better job to remember 7 digits more easily than 4 or more digits(This is partly the reason why telephone digits are around 7).

Based on information theory, the more digits we have, the more information they contains, thus require more bits to represent the information. But for human beings, this is not the case. This phenomenon is really interesting, and justifies the study for human brains. I guess Pat didn't realize this example is so exciting to me:)