So Defayntastic (127-138)

In this section of our assigned reading Hofstader strays away from his own personal work and looks at the work of one of his colleagues, Daniel Defay, that was on sabbatical from the University of Liège in Belgium. Defay was interested in learning more about Artificial Intelligence and the like. Defay had contacted Hofstadter with a great interest in a specific type of project that he wanted to pursue. Defay had a great interest in creating a program that was very similar to Hofstadter's Jumbo program. Defay however did not want to solve problems dealing with letters and words, but wanted to solve problems with numbers.

Defay's program, called Number, was based on a television show called Le compte est bon. This program would take a set of 5 numbers and would be given a goal number to try and achieve from the set of 5. Not all of the numbers need to be used as long as the goal is reached. I immediately thought of the crypto problems that we had been solving in class (where we have a set of 5 numbers and are given a goal number to reach. We can use the basic operators, +,-,x,/, to solve the problem and all numbers must be used). In Defay's program however only addition, subtraction, and multiplication may be used. I thought this would make it much easier for me, but it didn't.

Defay goes through his program and it made me think about how I actually solved the problems that he had given within the reading. He had given different examples for readers to try and solve and I found a few of them quite challenging when in fact they were really quite simple. It makes me wonder how we really do look at these problems in our minds. Defay states that there are "bricks" of numbers that are quite salient that I overlooked completely. This shot down my confidence more with math and made me appreciate Jumbles just a little more. It makes me feel as thought our brains are sometimes more open to solve language problems due to the use of language more than mathematics, but that is just my opinion ( a very biased one at that since I do not like Math as much as I really should). Defay explains this in his book L'esprit en friche, which I hope to read quite soon. His Numbo program is an interesting program that tries to look at human level problem solving with mathematics. I hope to find a copy of his book sometime in the near future.