It's All In Your Head 86-97

In this section Hofstadter starts off by telling us a little bit about a program called Jumbo. Jumbo tried to make English-like words out of a set of latters by re-arranging them and putting them into plausable orders. Hofstadter then goes on to tell us that he personally enjoys doing anagrams and is curious what goes on in one's brain while figuring out such problems. Hofstadter claims that words just magically pop into his head and he felt like a passive observer to this phenomenon.

Hofstadter then goes on to discuss knowledge sources, which he abreviates as KS. He claims that knowledge sources have to "sensory organs" to inform it and sense things in its surroundings. This makes me think that humans are probably the most advanced knowledge sources ever to exist.

Hofstadter then goes on to talk about something he read in a paper by Fennell & Lesser from 1975. What he read was: "Preconditions themselves have preconditions, call then 'pre-preconditions.' In HSII, knowledge-source preconditions.... may be arbitrarily complex. In order to avoid executing these precondition tests unnecessarily often, they in turn have pre-preconditions which are essentially monitors on relevant primitive data base events.... Whenever any of these primitive events occurs, those preconditions monitoring such events are awakened and allowed to test for full precondition satisfaction." Hofstadter really thought that this quote was packed with important information even though it was not emphasized in the reading. The fact that Hofstadter saw the value of that quote shows his natural ability to notice important information and use it to further enhance his studies and ideas.