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.