To Arthur!

First off, Happy To Arthur Guinness day! In this weeks assigned reading, Douglas Hofstadter talks about his artificial-intelligence research project called Jumbo. Jumbo’s purpose is to act like a human who is trying to solve a Jumble problem by taking a group of letters, then trying to take the letters and make it so that it can seek an English word out of the given letters.

Hofstadter did not give Jumbo a dictionary, because he thought that it defeated the purpose of what he was trying to replicate, in essence, human thought processes. What he did was give Jumbo instructions on how the English language makes its constructions, such as how consonant and vowel clusters are formed out of letters, syllables out of clusters, and words out of syllables. This immediately made me think of John Searle’s Chinese room argument, and made me think if Jumbo could really show some sort of human like intelligence, or an understanding of what it actually was doing.

I think Hofstadter was going in the correct direction when he was designing Jumbo and his thoughts and ideas that are there are very good. However, there is always the slight bit of doubt that an artificial-intelligence program is merely doing the work, but still does not have an understanding of what it is doing. I look forward to reading more about Jumbo to see the outcome of Hofstadter’s program.