Before we compare the intelligence of these two brilliant individuals, I’ll share a story of their meeting taken from the book titled Intelligence: Intelligence: Where We Were, Where We Are, & Where We’re Going:
In 1938, Claude Shannon, a 22-year old graduate student at MIT, provided a key link in turning Leibniz’s vision into a reality. In a ground-breaking paper based on his master’s thesis, he showed how the operations of boolean algebra could be represented using switching circuits. Early in 1943, Shannon was having tea in the cafeteria of the Bell Labs where he met British mathematician Alan Turing, whose genius would be celebrated 71 years later in the 2014 movie The Imitation Game. This movie, based on the book Alan Turing: The Enigma, traced Turing’s clever decryption of the Enigma code used by the German military for secret communication. Turing shared with Shannon a paper he had published in 1936, outlining how a theoretical device (later called a Universal Turing Machine) could execute a series of instructions, composed only of 0’s and 1’s, to perform any mathematical or logical computation. Shannon was impressed with Turing’s work in cryptography (encoding and decoding messages) because it was closely related to his work at Bell Labs in finding the best way to encode messages to minimize noise. His work in this area eventually led to the use of switching circuits in computers and the creation of information theory, paving the way for the Internet 50 years later.
Shannon’s uses for information theory were not exclusively academic. He and his wife often visited Las Vegas casinos on weekend junkets with Ed Thorp, a mathematician at MIT. The two mathematicians, together with physicist John L. Kelly Jr., had discovered that the odds in blackjack are slightly against the dealer when there remain a disproportionate number of face cards in the deck. Exploiting this slight advantage in the odds, and applying a card counting system they developed, the two mathematicians won their fortunes at the blackjack tables. When the casinos discovered they had been beaten by a clever counting system, they banned the two mathematicians from their casinos and began dealing cards from a shoe (containing several decks) instead of a single deck. Applying a similar analysis, which became known as the Kelly criterion, Shannon and Thorp delved into the stock market with even greater success. Their story was recounted in William Poundstone’s 2005 bestselling book Fortune’s Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street It seems there are few branches of mathematics that cannot find a useful application somewhere!
Before we can compare the intelligence of individuals, we must define this enigmatic trait. Although we all have an intuitive perception of what we mean by “intelligence.” During more than a century of debate and discussion, cognitive psychologists have proposed a variety of definitions of intelligence and there remains a diversity of opinion. However, psychologist Linda Gottfredson advanced, in 1997, a definition that has achieved some consensus among members of the American Psychological Association (APA):
Intelligence is a very general mental capability that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly, and learn from experience. It is not merely book-learning, a narrow academic skill, or test-taking smarts. Rather, it reflects a broader and deeper capability for comprehending our surroundings, “catching on,” “making sense” of things, or “figuring out” what to do.
A significant difficulty in defining intelligence with some level of precision derives from the fact that intelligence is manifest in a variety of different ways–sometimes in creativity, sometimes in oratory and sometimes in a deeply abstract conceptualization of ideas. You can visit some human personalities exuding each facet at: https://www.intelligence-and-iq.com/the-many-faces-of-intelligence/. Since intelligence is multi-dimensional, it cannot be measured as a “linear order,” i.e., as a list that can place individuals in a sequence comparing any two. IQ attempts to do this, but it does not have much meaning above IQ 140. ( For example, the complex numbers are not a linear order. Different numbers can have the same magnitude but neither is greater than the other.) Similarly, comparing the intelligence of Turing and Shannon is not possible, because they both had IQ’s above the range where IQ is an accurate measure and each could probably solve problems that the other could not. For a more detailed investigation of this problem, visit: How does the genius of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs compare with the more theoretical geniuses behind the computer (i.e., von Neumann, Turing, Godel)? – Intelligence and IQ
