Numbo vs. Human Performance

There are several ways in which Numbo's performance compared to that of a human's. Hofstadter breaks it down into several different bullets, 4 in which its performance is comparable. These four are as follows:

1) Obvious solutions are found at once
2) Ideas are not necessarily systematically explored, and in fact are often abandoned before having been fully examined
3) The combinations created are not always strongly goal-driven, so that unmotivated-apearing avenues are occationally embarked upon.
4) Solutions are often found that involve the chaining of several arithmetical operation in a seemingly logical way.

I think that all of these are good design features to emulate in a machine that is meant to mimic human cognition. The two points that really stand out for me are the first and the fourth. The first is because humans have a tendency to try the simplest solutions first, maybe because they are easy and stand out, or maybe because human's are lazy. The fourth is because of a point that Hofstadter made earlier in this chapter, how most people know right away that 87 is 80 + 7, so trying to get to 87 from 8, 10, and 7, is an easy problem.

"We soon dubbed (it) 'Numbo', for obvious reasons"

In this chapter in Hofstadter's book he beings to talk about the project he developed along with a friend which they dubbed "Numbo". This is a program that was designed to solve problems similar to the crypto problems we were given in class. The key differences are that the numbers chosen to add up to the goal can be between 1 and 25, inclusive, the goal number can be a number between 1 and 150 inclusive, and not all of the numbers need to be used to obtain the goal. I feel like, with a few changes to our crypto code we would, in fact, have already created our own versions of Numbo; but I guess my knowledge of Prolog is still nominal so maybe it would be more work then I think.

The difference between our would-be Prolog Numbo and Hofstadter's Numbo would be exactly HOW is derives its answer. One of the reasons why Hofstadter is such an impressive Cognitive Scientist is because he looks at how people, real human beings, solve such problems and attempts to model it in a similar way. I envy the ability to be able to sit down and pick apart human consciousness as Hofstadter seems to do fairly easily. Perhaps with enough time in the field I too will gain more insight into how human's think, until then, I'm sure reading more of Hofstadter's works will be an essential guide.