Legg-Hutter universal intelligence implies classical music is better than pop music for intellectual training

In their thought-provoking paper, Legg and Hutter consider a certain abstrac- tion of an intelligent agent, and define a universal intelligence measure, which assigns every such agent a numerical intelligence rating. We will briefly summarize Legg and Hutter’s paper, and then give a tongue-in-cheek argument that if one’s goal is to become more intelligent by cultivating music appreciation, then it is bet- ter to use classical music (such as Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven) than to use more recent pop music. The same argument could be adapted to other media: books beat films, card games beat first-person shooters, parables beat dissertations, etc. We leave it to the reader to decide whether this argument tells us something about classical music, something about Legg-Hutter intelligence, or something about both.