What if intelligence isn't biological accident, but mathematical necessity?

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What if intelligence isn’t biological accident, but mathematical necessity?

The Universal Computational Problem

Let me start with something that might seem almost trivial, but I think will turn out to be profound: every system that processes information under constraints faces the same fundamental optimization problem. Here’s the mathematical setup: You have limited computational resources, uncertain future states, and multiple competing objectives. The question becomes: How do you optimally allocate your finite resources to maximize your success across all objectives under uncertainty?

This abstract math problem is the same challenge that faces a bacterium deciding where to swim in a chemical gradient, or a human deciding which job offer to accept, or an AI system deciding which aspects of a complex query deserve deep analysis (of course, with enormous differences in computational substrates, timescales, and optimization procedures).

What I want to show you is that this single mathematical framework might explain something interesting that’s starting to happen in AI.

How Biology Solved the Problem