There’s a scene in the movie The Hobbit II: The Desolation of Smaug which Tolkien did not put into the original book.

The movie version goes like this: The thirteen dwarves and Bilbo Baggins have just spent one and a half movies fighting their way to the place where Thorin, leader of the dwarves, expects to find a secret entrance into the lost dwarven kingdom of Erebor. This entrance can only be opened on a particular day of the year (Durin’s Day), and they have a decoded map saying, Stand by the grey stone when the thrush knocks, and the last light of Durin’s day will shine upon the keyhole.

And then the sun sets behind a mountain, and they still haven’t found the keyhole. So Thorin… I find this painful to write… Thorin throws down the key in disgust and all the dwarves start to head back down the mountain, leaving only Bilbo behind to stare at the stone wall. And so Bilbo is the only one who sees when the light of the setting moon suddenly reveals the keyhole.

(Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O34oOCB_7Kk.)

That thing where movie!Thorin throws down the key in disgust and walks away?

I wouldn’t have done that.

You wouldn’t have done that.

We’d wait at least an hour in case there was some beam of sunlight about to shoot through the side of the mountain, and then we’d come back tomorrow, just in case. And if that still failed we’d try again a year later. We wouldn’t drop the key. We wouldn’t wander off the instant something went wrong.

The scriptwriter thought it would make a Dramatic Moment to leave Bilbo watching the side of the mountain alone. But the price of that Dramatic Moment was to populate the movie with strange, bizarre creatures who do not think like you or I; and so the Dramatic Moment fell flat, at least for me.

We could say that these strange creatures lack a certain sort of awareness. The scriptwriter wants us to be yelling at movie!Thorin, “No! You fool! Don’t do that!” but it does not occur to the scriptwriter that Thorin might yell this at himself, that Thorin might detect his own idiocy the way we see it plain upon the screen. Movie!Thorin has no little voice in his own head to yell these things at him, the way that you or I are the little voices in our own heads. We could call movie!Thorin a Hollywood Zombie, or H-Zombie for short.

Okay, now let’s talk about the concept of ‘intelligent characters’.

If you go by mainstream fiction, then ‘intelligence’ means a character who is said (not shown) to speak a dozen languages, who we are shown winning a game of chess against someone else who is told to be a grandmaster; if it’s a (bad) science-fiction book then the ‘genius’ may have invented some gadget, and may speak in technobabble. As the stereotypical template for ‘intelligence’ goes on being filled in, the ‘genius’ may also be shown to be clueless about friendships or romantic relationships. If it’s a movie or TV show, then ‘intelligent’ characters (usually villains) have British accents.

To a cognitive scientist, intelligence is a kind of cognitive work, a labor performed by brains—not necessarily human brains—the same way that a car engine outputs torque that turns wheels and drives a car forward. What is this cognitive work? We could say, “To model, predict, and manipulate reality.” Or we could say, “To output actions that steer the future into outcomes high in a preference ordering.”

Hollywood’s concept of intelligence has nothing to do with cognitive work. Instead it’s a social stereotype. It’s about what ‘intelligent characters’ wear, how they talk, how many of them it takes to change a lightbulb.

I say all this, so as to mark Hollywood’s concept of ‘intelligence’ and set it aside as a fallacy when we ask how we might have gone about writing a more intelligent Thorin.

This more intelligent Thorin has not invented an amazing new kind of shield out of super-oak.

This more intelligent Thorin is not charmingly clueless or contemptibly clueless about romance.

This more intelligent Thorin does not need to use big technical-sounding words or recite numbers with many significant digits.

This more intelligent Thorin has not secretly planned out the entire encounter to give Smaug a false sense of security. We’ll talk about how to do that kind of cleverness correctly, what you might call cunning, in the section on Level II Intelligent Characters. There is no point in trying to write Level II Intelligent Characters if you have not mastered Level I. Also Level I intelligence is more important.

More intelligent Thorin does not instantly find the keyhole by use of his incredibly keen perceptual abilities. Telling the reader that a character has sharp eyes does not put a spark of inner life and optimization into that character.

More intelligent Thorin does not even solve the riddle using clues that were clearly given in earlier chapters and that the reader could in principle have figured out on their own—though that is a character feat that exhibits real cognitive labor (also covered in Intelligence Level II).

No, step one towards a more intelligent Thorin is just to have Thorin behave like there is a person inside him figuring out the best thing to do, like you or I would in his shoes, as opposed to an H-Zombie who throws down the key in order to provide Bilbo with a Dramatic Moment.

Step one is to, in a very basic and ordinary fashion, have a character who does what seems, to that character, like the best thing to do in that situation—who optimizes their own life rather than behaving in ways convenient for the plot. Not, necessarily, super duper tremendously clevely optimizes; the great lesson of Artificial Intelligence is that everyday routine optimization already contains most of the difficulty of human-level intelligence. Not inventing a new shield of super-oak, not even solving the riddle; the kind of ‘optimization’ we’re talking about is being inhabited by an inner spark that is trying to make its own life go well rather than serve your plot. That’s the spark movie!Thorin is missing; that’s the spark that might hear the audience’s voice inside itself; that’s the spark that wouldn’t throw down the key.

(Discussion.)