What's meant by heuristics is some times unclear. I wonder if by heuristics you mean a shortcut. In CS and AI our model of a shortcut is the heuristic cost functions in heuristic search algorithms like A* and its variants.
It's interesting because I've thought along the following lines. A* is a pathfinding algorithm so it's a natural choice for path planning -the process of planning a path through some environment for an autonomous agent to follow. The funny thing is, as it turns out, pathfinding can be abstracted as finding a "path" through a graph: a set of nodes connected by edges; and that's a great abstraction for general task planning - the task of achieving any arbitrary objective - so A* is also widely used for task planning.
Well, isn't path planning an almost universal ability of intelligent animals? Most animals are motile for some part of their lives and they seem to use their intelligence at the very least to navigate their environment. So is it that far-fetched to think that an ancestral ability for path planning, essentially identical to a heuristic search algorithm like A*, evolved into general intelligence? And wouldn't that mean that general intelligence can be, ultimately, modeled as some kind of heuristic search?
The answer I think is: no, and that's a dangerous way to think. A model is a model, it's not the process it models. And I think that's my fundamental disagreement with lisper, disregarding my confusion about the meaning of "kinematics".
It's interesting because I've thought along the following lines. A* is a pathfinding algorithm so it's a natural choice for path planning -the process of planning a path through some environment for an autonomous agent to follow. The funny thing is, as it turns out, pathfinding can be abstracted as finding a "path" through a graph: a set of nodes connected by edges; and that's a great abstraction for general task planning - the task of achieving any arbitrary objective - so A* is also widely used for task planning.
Well, isn't path planning an almost universal ability of intelligent animals? Most animals are motile for some part of their lives and they seem to use their intelligence at the very least to navigate their environment. So is it that far-fetched to think that an ancestral ability for path planning, essentially identical to a heuristic search algorithm like A*, evolved into general intelligence? And wouldn't that mean that general intelligence can be, ultimately, modeled as some kind of heuristic search?
The answer I think is: no, and that's a dangerous way to think. A model is a model, it's not the process it models. And I think that's my fundamental disagreement with lisper, disregarding my confusion about the meaning of "kinematics".