Luke isn’t arguing over definitions as far as I could see, he was checking to see if there was a possibility of communication.
A heuristic is a quick and dirty way of getting an approximation to what you want, when getting a more accurate estimate would not be worth the extra effort/energy/whatever it would cost. As I see it the confusion here arises from the fact that you believe this has something to do with goals and utility functions. It doesn’t. These can be arbitrary for all we care. But, any intelligence no matter it’s goals or utility function will want to achieve things, after all that’s what it means to have goals. If it has sufficient computational power handy it’ll use an accurate estimator, if not a heuristic.
Heuristics have nothing to do with goals, adaptations not ends
Luke isn’t arguing over definitions as far as I could see, he was checking to see if there was a possibility of communication.
A heuristic is a quick and dirty way of getting an approximation to what you want, when getting a more accurate estimate would not be worth the extra effort/energy/whatever it would cost. As I see it the confusion here arises from the fact that you believe this has something to do with goals and utility functions. It doesn’t. These can be arbitrary for all we care. But, any intelligence no matter it’s goals or utility function will want to achieve things, after all that’s what it means to have goals. If it has sufficient computational power handy it’ll use an accurate estimator, if not a heuristic.
Heuristics have nothing to do with goals, adaptations not ends