>>6Menti, what is your IQ level?
Not that smart, that's for sure. Dunno much about geometry, and dunno why I keep responding in this thread. It is painful to be _almost_ but not quite smart enough to do artificial intelligence (AI). But in case my non-existent descendants ever want to know, lemme rumble/ramble on. As a second-grader in the Panama Canal Zone, I had never even wondered about being smart or not, but one day the teacher wrote ten words on the blackboard and told us to use each word in a sentence. So I asked her if we could use two of the words in a single sentence, and I slowly proceeded to do so. So some kid comes over to me and says, "Why are you taking so long? You are usually one of the smart kids." Duh! News to me.
Then in high-school freshman year, Latin was my most difficult subject, but in sophomore year I caught on to Latin and I also tried to learn Czech (fail) and then Russian (OK) and German (OK) on my own. In the meantime I was always reading Time Magazine and following the world news. In senior-year World Problems, the teacher had a stack of index-cards with one question for each student, one at a time, but no student knew the answers until she got to Mentifex, whom she could not stump, even though she made me walk to the front of the class and point out each pertinent location on the map of the world. Meanwhile, V.T.Y. very-truly-yours was learning how to max tests, by speeding through them and trying to answer every question. For the now deprecated Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), Mentifex did okay in the language part and less well in the math part, but got a perfect score in the Latin SaT. Test results kept showing that your AI wannabe was in the 98th percentile, while later on he discovered that successful persons in Computer Science did a lot better, namely, the 99th percentile. And one test that supposedly measured the intelligence quotient (IQ) scored Mentifex at 145.
Then your sucker Mentifex got drafted out of U Cal Berkeley graduate school and into the U.S. Army. There he found out two possibly IQ-related things. During the acquisition of Army uniforms, M*ntifex found out that he had a physically large head, because he needed a hat-size of seven and a half. But even pin-heads can be smart. Second, the sergeants told M*ntifex on his fifth day in the Army that he had a high general-technical (GT) score of 149, and so he was qualified to sign up for an Army school. M*ntifex signed up for Nuclear Weapons Electronics School at Redstone Arsenal (electronics) and Sandia Base (crispy critters). Although terrified at first, Mentifex graduated first-in-class for electronics and at the bottom for boring nukes. When he got to his duty station in Germany at the 101st Ordnance Battalion, the clerks said they had to call up some guy in the boonies and tell him that he no longer had the highest GT score in the battalion.
So why did M*ntifex, who was not really top-notch smart, spend his adult life working on and solving the problem of artificial intelligence? Because toying with electrical and then electronic things made Mentifex want to solve the greatest problem of them all -- how do we think, and therefore how can we make Machines Who Think (requiescas in pace, Pamela McCorduck)?
Happy Beethoven's Birthday, everybuddy!