Last time I acknowledged that I thought that Hofstadter’s idea of creating an anagram solving machine that would solve problems in its domain with a human’s though processes in mind was in itself a flawed idea. I thought that because there would always be faster, more powerful, or more accurate brute force systems out there that Hofstadter’s JUMBO was little more than an, albeit interesting, curiosity. However, in this chapter the writer defends his idea for developing JUMBO the way that he did.
Hofstadter’s program come in stark contrast with a brute force program that would simply look at a large list of possible words from the dictionary. Instead JUMBO does something more intuitive, more human like; it takes letters and groups them together just like a human does to form pseudo-English words, or combinations that aren’t really words but look like they could be. He got this idea by observing his own thought processes while doing an anagram, indeed his brain would subconsciously group together letters that looked like they could fit next to each other, and eventually he would come across the most probable, if not only, solution.
Obviously looking at problem from a Cognitive Science viewpoint can drastically change your method of solving it. In the case above not only did Hofstadter manage to create a system that would do exactly what it needed to, but he created a system that would do it in an interesting and insightful way. That is the power of thinking outside the box and modeling programs after the human brain, after all the human brain IS the greatest computer ever built.
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