Seasons

Sounds more like Socrates to me.

If you want to screw someone like that up, just ask them to define definition.

Definition: usually brief statement explaining the meaning of a word or phrase.
Seriously, though. A bot can be considered intelligent in the sense that it can carry on a meaningful conversation, or in the sense that it can come up with a solution to a difficult problem... And those are only two possibilities. My favorite definition is "able to put together concepts in a new or novel fashion"

Ok, what do you mean by meaning?

And what do you mean by mean? We can take semantics as far as we want, but we have to know what we're talking about. I can type alkjive, and it looks like nonsense, until we have a consensus that it stands for some concept. But we use "intelligence" in dozens of ways. The only commonality between the usages is that it implies being "good at" something, whether that's schoolwork, survival, preparing meals... So what are we asking the bots to be "good at" to deem them intelligent?

conversation skills.

That seems...unambitious to me...

No, I mean, like actually keep going with a topic when it's sensed that that should be done, change it when it should be changed, joke around, and carry a conversation like a human. There's a lot more to conversation than throwing sentences around that match words.

Learn languages and store it. etc, etc, etc.

Ulrike, you're the one who wanted definitions. If you can't come up with them, you can't demand others provide them. So let's cut the sophistry and get to the meat:

Charles Hathaway: that's a tricky one. Conversation skills for a bot keep bringing us back to the issue: the bot can be no better than three things: the capacity of the server, the programmer, and the programmer's understanding of her/his capacities.

We almost want to ask if we should waste our time with this? Do we ask about the intelligence of poetry, for example? When a poet writes a poem, it is released onto the world and whatever effects it has depend on the skill of the creator, the perceptions of the reader, and the quality of the media itself.

I see these bots as a kind of a poem. So why are we talking about intelligence? They are characters.

Good point.

Gazissax: I gave potential definitions, which no one else had done. You, however, seem to think that all definitions are useless, in which case there can be no communication. Yes, our bots are characters, because that is really all they can be right now. But the discussion was of AI in general, and where such ideas might ultimately lead.

That's true. But your poems, gasiccaz, have to make sense of themselves, on their own. And poems are inanimate creations, where what we are talking about here is something that is inanimate becoming so animated that it seems intelligent.