Today's post, Recognizing Intelligence was originally published on 07 November 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
Suppose we landed on another planet and found a large metal object that contained wires made of superconductors, and hundreds of tightly matched gears. Would we be able to infer the presence of an optimization process?
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Probably they don't find the algorithm for determining whether something is a product of evolution or a product of intelligence satisfactory. Especially when the algorithm is not written explicitly; there is mostly just a suggestion that after some exploring, we would know the difference.
Pieces of metal, gears, doing some work... seems like an obvious evidence of an intelligent design. Unless we consider the possibility that they somehow evolved in this strange alien biology. Or are they something like a bee hive or a beaver dam -- a product of a life form, but not very intelligently designed. Perhaps the alien "bees" create these metallic gears and assemble the machines instinctively. In which case I would expect all such machines to be rather similar to each other.
The article does not explore this interesting topic deeply enough. It just suggests that it can be done.