Jumble

Word jumbles have been my arch enemy for quite some time now, along with crossword puzzles and sudoku. In the reading from pages 87-95, Hofstadter talks a great deal about anagrams and his attempt at writing a computer program that attempts to make "...English-like words out of a set of letters by rearranging them and putting them into plausible order."

Hofstadter talks about how he has enjoyed solving Jumbles for quite some time. I on the other hand have not had great luck in anagrams even though I do enjoy them. His Jumbo program seems like an interesting program, but I feel as though it'd be a very difficult program to write. After reading about how there were brute-force anagram programs that used abridged dictionaries, I was more interested on Hofstadter's take on how he would accomplish this goal. It seems to me that there would be a plethora of answers for a particular set of letters when doing an anagram with one of these brute-force programs, or even with his Jumbo program. He does have a great interest in human cognition and he does state that this is a problem and that it this is the reason why he does not like the brute-force programs.

After reading this section I thought about when I was taking Linguistics 100 a few years ago. How there are so many difficult rules in the English language and how his Jumbo program could decipher all of the different rules that the English language carried. It only makes me think that there could be mistakes somewhere down the line just like the human language.