A little weird

I'm feeling a little strange tonight. I've been feeling strange for a while.
I'm sitting up, trying to think about where I fit in with everything.

I haven't worked on any games lately, and haven't thought much about my theories of them, because I've been so busy with school that I can barely think. But I still believe that there's something there, that can be used for a lot of good.

I really want to experiment with AI. I think that's the next step. Yes, I think graphics are fascinating, especially when you consider it's just "fooling" the viewer with bunch of math! But there's something about the essential element of "thinking" that just intrigues me. There hasn't been a definitive answer to the question "what is intelligence?" It seems any attempts to provide a quantitative answer ends up with the definition being thrown out the window.

So how can a machine think? And what does it mean for a machine to think?

This is where I must repeat that the definition of a machine thinking HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH RESEMBLING A HUMAN. That is way too ambitious, way too complex.

But think about it. Does a fish think? Does a bird think? Does a snail think?

So if we made a machine that emulated a snail, but not a human, can we capture intelligence?

And can we make intelligence useful? What are our constraints?

Games are the best field, because games revolve around a limited set of nouns (objects which constitute a world, described by a set of adjectives which describe the objects attributes). In this world, the verbs are cut down to a limited set. The set of the allowable verbs are "rules".
These rules are described by a set of adverbs. In reality, a fancy graphic animation is nothing more than an adverb. The better the graphics, the fancier the adverb. Same thing with the description of object, a nice texture is nothing more than a nice adjective.

But really, the nouns and verbs are what constitute the actual language. The boy pets the dog.
That is the main point. The fact that the boy is young, and the dog is brown, gives you a better description of what we are describing. But in reality, we are talking about boys and dogs.

Look around you, look at the world. Think about how many nouns and verbs there are to describe the world we live in. Way too many to simulate!

Compare it to a game. Now we can create a finite set.

So the question is, if we create a sort of intelligence revolving around a limited set of nouns and verbs, does this translate to intelligence when the our language is expanded?

That's the question. I do not know the answer. I may never know the answer, but my intent is to better educate my guess.