Intelligence Knows Nothing 35-55

In pages 35 to 55 of Hofstadter's book, he discusses come very interesting things. He starts off by talking about how his own strategy for constructing an intelligent program appeared to have a flaw in it. He states that there is a difference between knowledge and intelligence. In his attempt to make an intelligent program, he stuffed it full of sophisticated math, which really didn't make it intelligent at all. Hofstadter tells of his ideas of intelligence in this quote, "Of course some domain knowledge is neccessary to get off the ground , but I had very deep intuitions to the effect that intelligence has - and has to have - a powerful, general, and abstract knowledge-independent core."

Another interesting thing he talks about is how one perceives things cann affect their ability to see and not see certain sequences. Hofstadter talks about how in one particular sequence of numbers the way he was used to looking at things hurt him when he tried to find a sequence, he explains that in this quote, "Specifically, the two idetical numbers "wanted", in my mind, to be kept together, so it took considerable external pressure to knock me out of this default way of seeing things." This shows that looking at things from different angles can be very beneficial sometimes.

Something else I found very interesting was a problem he presented, in which he gave the first three numbers of a sequence, then asked if you could guess which number came next. The pattern was 0,1,2..., most people would probably guess 3, but the answer is 720 factorial, he explains how and it makes perfect sense. I really liked this problem.