I confess to being excited about the prospect myself.

SF writers have pondered the question. There's a vignette in Jack Chalker's Nathan Brazil series (the first one) about an encounter with aliens who are so ... well ... ALIEN that their intelligence is not something we easily percieve.

There's the one ST:TNG episode where they meet the aliens who communicate by metaphor, but they don't figure it out till near the end of the show. There are probably other episodes with similar idea that elude me for the moment. Also, in B5 there was that race of aliens who seemed to communicate in a weird way. While I think these are interesting ideas to play with, I'm not so sure they're applicable.

The mouse, after we understand the behavior, really seems to be doing something we recognize as intelligent. Not so sure about the ant behaviors, which could be purely mechanical. OTOH, we interpreted previous mouse behaviors - or failed to interpret them in a way - based on some false assumptions. (or that's my take). maybe it's the same with the ants.

Kinda like the problem they had with understanding egyptian heiroglyphs prior to the rosetta stone -- they made some prior notion that the heiroglyphics were pictographic, when they were really phonetic. (aside to the aside - chinese, while mostly pictographic, does have a class of words that are sorta phonetic -- I don't recall the details, but they're like pairs of symbols where the pair take on the sound of one of the characters - but a completely different meaning.)

I think part of the thing about recognizing intelligence in other people is being patient enough to figure out what it is they're saying or doing and why they're saying or doing it. I don't believe that all people are equally intelligent, or even that all have equal potential. (I do, however, think that the vast majority of people are - mentally if not emotionally - capable of understanding the vast majority of idea that humanity has come up with.)

Note that I don't think that I'm particularly well-adapted to understanding other people or recognizing their intellect. Nor is it that I make some conscious effort to evaluate other people's intelligence - or even my own. However, some hypotheses suggest themselves to me when communication reveals a process a little too low on the S and a little too high on the N. I don't think this is a bad thing to do, so long as one tests the hypotheses. But there is a problem in general with having the patience - really the diligence -to be willing to question these tentative assumptions.

k