Jumbo and results

This section of reading, in its entirety, is a good illustration of Hofstadter’s earlier statement regarding the two divisions of programming. That is, there’s programming for results and then programming in respect to modeling processes. (More or less, if nothing else, the reference is there and this is how I understood his statement.) I’m hesitant to say that though, because it makes programming intended to model some process sound less useful in terms of getting actual results. I’m not sure if there’s really a rift here or if I’m just thinking there’s one because the difference was expressed.

That said, the descriptions of the processes applied by Jumbo are quite poetic. It’s hard not to appreciate the way it works. I wish I could actually see the code for it. Regardless, I think that the whole thing would be an interesting concept to apply to other problems. If nothing else, I’m interested in playing with some of the concepts myself. To clear up some of the vagaries here, I’m talking about the idea of individual chunks of data having “preference” as to which other things they’re glommed with. Off the top of my head, I’m not entirely sure what other sorts of data you can apply this to.

On a total side note, I’d be interested to see the sort of thing Jumbo does be applied to other languages with separate rules. Can you make a framework that accepts some table of preferences for the individual characters and then lead it to construct actual pseudo-words? What about the languages that don’t use things similar to our idea of an alphabet? (Chinese/Japanese?)

I must think more on this.