More on Jumbo

In this section, Hofstadter continues to talk about Jumbo and its operations. Of particular interest to me in this portion of the book is the “musing” property of the program coupled with the idea of self-observation. It seems a little curious to attribute things like “happy” or “unhappy” to a program in general, but it seems to work as a metric to measure completeness of a grouping. Additionally, along the way, the choice that makes the grouping the happiest is the path that is most likely to get chosen. So happiness here is a factor both the path and the end result.

Randomness is another issue in this. It goes without saying, perhaps, that the exclusion of randomness would make the construction of gloms much more deterministic and one sided. Perhaps the program itself would cease to function as intended entirely if randomness were omitted. The same gloms would be made out of the same character groupings repeatedly, and the configurations would only really change if other characters with interfering preferences were inserted. But then, the program is actually intended to model cognitive processes, so the idea of a random-less Jumbo is moot. If nothing else, it makes one appreciate the fact that a higher priority action doesn’t always win out when it comes to order.

Having a program evaluate possible outcomes of operations is an interesting topic to apply to other sorts of problems. Self-observation in this context is actually something I’d have liked to hear more about. There’s always this slight notion of self-monitoring within applications, but it usually doesn’t usually take place outside of severely constrained situations. (null checking for example)