Intibak kabiliyeti
Turkish for the ability to adapt. In Cahit Arf's 1959 lecture on thinking machines, it is the threshold that matters: not how many problems a machine solves, but whether it can adapt to new ones.
Intibak kabiliyeti is Turkish for the ability to adapt. It is the central idea in the lecture the Turkish mathematician Cahit Arf published in 1959, "Can a machine think, and how can it think?"
Arf asks what would happen if a machine could solve not one problem but ten thousand. His answer is that the number is not decisive if all ten thousand were, in effect, already solved when the machine was designed. What counts is whether the machine can respond to something its designers did not anticipate. The threshold is adaptation.
A modern reading
The idea maps directly onto an evaluation problem. A model can perform well across hundreds of benchmarks and still be brittle outside the tested distribution. An agent can finish an impressive workflow and fail when a tool returns an unexpected state. Adaptation is exactly what a fixed test set measures least.
Arf also paired it with akl-ı selim, sound judgment, and with a view that learning changes the category of a machine: a system that can be improved by its experience is different from one that stays as it was built.
Read more in Cahit Arf's 1959 question about thinking machines.
Related terms
Akl-ı selim
Turkish for sound judgment or common sense. Cahit Arf used it to argue that expertise should help us exercise our own understanding rather than become a conclusion we repeat because an authority said it.
Benchmark
A standardised test used to compare AI models. Useful as evidence about someone else's system, but only trustworthy for you when it describes the exact serving route, harness and conditions you will run.