Speed is what distinguishes intelligence. No bird discovers how to fly: evolution used a trillion bird-years to 'discover' that – where merely hundreds of person-years sufficed.

— Marvin Minsky, Communication with Alien Intelligence (1985)

Source: http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/AlienIntelligence.html

Chapter in Extraterrestrials: Science and Alien Intelligence (1985); also in Byte, April 1985.

Topics: learning