Jumbo versus brute force/Bombers curve jutes four

Anagrams are really really neat for several reasons. First off, I think it is really interesting how by just looking at some words our brains will automatically pick out the letters, reverse them, manipulate them, until in our heads we can picture several words. Many of us have, I am sure, tried to find different anagrams for our names (Craig Graci... hmmm?) so when Hofstadter wrote that he has designed a program, Jumbo, to solve anagrams I thought that that was a really neat idea. But his program was slow compared to similar brute force programs, and I began to wonder why. If his program was meant to mimic human consciousness, I would think that it would be rather fast, given that Hofstadter himself said that (for small words at least) he was able to find quite a few anagrams within seconds.

Obviously we don't have hardware that can match the power of the human brain, but when we do, if we were able to mimic the human consciousness/unconsciousness exactly, as it relates to solving anagrams, then we would have a very powerful system indeed. But I still doubt that it would beat the speed of a brute force algorithm that could check given letter against all the words in an unabridged dictionary in mere moments. This makes me think that while trying to emulate the human brain for all tasks can be really cool, and good for learning more about how we think, in practice it's not AS reasonable. So even in the future I don't think that, given the choice, the industry will always pick the program that mimics a human's thought process. Hofstadter writes about brute force algorithms and such as if they are inconsequential, but in reality they will most likely always be a part of our software society.