Science & Cocktails: Intelligence, Stupidity, Outer-Space, and the Mysteries of the Puzzle

Science & Cocktails is a series of public talks by scientists with live music and smoky dry-ice chilled cocktails in your hand.

19:45 doors open for cocktails
20:00 Live band (TBA)
20:30 Prof. dr. David Krakauer (talk)
Event in English, semi-seated.

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Why has intelligence evolved on earth? What is the nature of collective intelligence and stupidity? What is the connection between a puzzle, mathematics, and expertise? How is machine intelligence different from human intelligence? How are secret codes and alien signals related?

What do communication with aliens, science, cryptology, and solving puzzles have in common? The answer is an effort to measure intelligence. Over the course of several millennia humanity has obsessed over its own intelligence and, in the process, achieved incredible levels of stupidity. At the core of our understanding of both intelligence and stupidity are the roles of facts, rules, and algorithms. In the last few years, the rise of machine learning, discoveries in the study of collective intelligence, and our understanding of nonhuman life, have led to a revolution in our understanding of cognition and a great divergence in the categories of sentient beings. I shall discuss recent ideas and discoveries in the science of intelligence as a complex system -- from tool use to the Rubik's cube - and report on new grounds for optimism and growing sources of despair.