To Glom Or Not To Glom

...that is the question. What Hofstadter means by the word glom, is to put two things together into some type of chunk. On page 110, Hofstadter talks about higher-level structures having their own properties, and he uses this example. He first takes the letter units "t" "h" and "e" and says that a person can make the word "the" out of these three letter units, but for the higher-level structuring he is talking about is taking "th" (as one glom) and attaching it to "e" to have a two units making up a word instead of three. This brought up a very intriguing aspect to me, and it dealt with what Hofstadter was talking about earlier in the chapter.

From page 99:
"...the way in which we mentally juggle many little pieces and tentatively combine them into various bigger pieces in an attempt to come up with something novel, meaningful and strong."
This quote made me think of the idea of taking a single idea, and making it into something larger (such as a thesis or a dissertation). We, as humans, do this everyday when it comes to "putting the pieces together." When it comes to something as simple as being able to read a newspaper article and understanding what is being said within. So, going from small scale to large scale was an important aspect, how about reversing it?

There is a quote from someone I can't recall, that went along these lines: "I started out wanting to cure the world, I then focused on human anatomy only, which brought me to the brain, which has me working on memory..." So, this idea of starting big, ending small isn't a bad one, but it can be very overwhelming. This was Hofstadter's idea with the terraced scan. Having almost everything laid out in front of you, but then having to sift your way through the "top" portions of these ideas, to figure out what it is you are looking for. He uses the analogy of "don't judge a book by its cover." So, as humans, we also do this on a day to day basis. Getting back to the newspaper example, why did someone choose that particular article to read? As humans, we utilize these methods everyday of our lives.

-Bryan

maragan

Can you figure out the anagram from my title??? Anagrams are just one of the things that Hofstadter talked about in the preface to chapter 2. But, the To Read or, Toreador section brought up some interesting points on how and everday cognitive activity can be used in a program. Jumbo, Hofstadters anagram solving machine, was put up to the task to try and figure out how to make all of the letters fit together. Hofstadter brings up the point of the word hotshots, and some others, and how some can perceieve the word to be read as "hots hots" (say that ten times fast). Now, my point on this is when is a machine able to decipher "hotshots" from "hots hots" ?

This is what Hofstadter was getting to when he was talking about the nonstandard parsing. He goes on to say that we, as humans, are rather remarkable insofar as to not be tripped up by this. I should say, most humans are good at this. To be able to take a frozen set of letters, and be able to convert it into a uniformed word or phrase is rather impressive. But, it is one of those "things" in life that is often over looked (such as the ability of a five year old to boot up a computer and actually use it). So, I'll end with this link to a pretty cool anagram unscrambler.

http://www.crossword-dictionary.com/anagram.asp

-Bryan

Me Two (or three)

Hofstadter brought up the "Me-Too" Phenomenon on page 75. I instantly thought of another example that (at least I think) always comes into play with the phenomenon. So, when I was a very small child, my Uncle went to me "I'm going to have a baby!" This blew me away! I was no more than eight (maybe twenty...) and he just stated (with exasperation) that he, (my Uncle) was going to have a baby. Whoa...I won't go into any biology but needless to say I was shocked. But then I figured out, (and I think you all know where I'm going with this) that he wasn't going to have a baby, my Aunt was. Thus, at some level I had to generalize the situation, to figure out what was going on. This is a perfect example on what I think Hofstadter was trying to convey. That, what we say as humans, must be interpreted in a fluid manner, or else it won't make sense. This shared essence, as he calls it, must be totally implicit (pg. 75).

How does all of this tie into our course? Well, I pondered on this question for a little bit and this is what came about. That, when we do these types of "Me-Too" gestures, we as humans seem to be able to process it, with little trouble, unless someone is out in left field when they are suppose to be on the pitchers mound (I'll stop with my horrible "sports" puns). To fix these issues, we could use logic (a very general logic), and it would lay out a nice and neat form of what is being said when a person encounters the "Me-Too" Phenomenon. If we can define thought (maybe language?) in this way, we could try to clear up the generalizations that happen when the "Me-Too" Phenomenon occurs.

I'll leave with a question: What would happen with a person who had dual-personality syndrome and this "Me-Too" Phenomenon? Just something to think about... Or how about this, would if we had a program that runs parallel with itself, and it encounters the phenomenon? A lot of ambiguous problems could occur.
-Bryan

And so on...

"..."

What does this really mean? To us, it means that whatever came before in a sequence, should just repeat itself throughout. For example, 1, 2, 3, 4... We are suppose to interpret this (as humans should) that the next logical number should be n + 1, where n represents the last number in the sequence. Hofstadter brings this notion up in the section entitled "On Deciphering Shorter versus Longer Messages," as well as in an earlier part of the chapter. My question is, do we as humans really know what comes next in any type of sequence, whether it be numbers or language? Could this just be another case of rule following, or another case of heuristics?

Hofstadter brings up another key point on page 68, when he is talking about a "message" being too long or too short. If it is too long, we can get easily confused by trying to deal with too much information, and if it is too short, we may not have enough evidence to make any sort of conclusion on how the sequence should continue on. So, Hofstadter talks about analogy-making, and how AI models of this nature, are created in such a way that the "blurriness" of a sequence is taken away, and certain set constraints are put in place.

I'll leave with a quote:

"The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is
Rapidly fadin'.
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin'."

Bob Dylan


-Bryan

Musical Math

There was an interesting section in the reading we had to do for this entry. It was on pages 49 - 51 and the section was titled "Good-bye Math... Hello Music!" Okay, maybe in the context that Hofstadter was trying to convey with saying that he didn't want to get bogged down in the "real musical understanding" but to rather be influenced by melodic patterns seems fair for the Seek-Whence Project (Hofstadter, 1995, 50). But, I would like to take a little twist on this take of music (since I have been a "musician" for over a decade now), and how it deals with math.

I'll start with his melodic sequence that he used in the book (EAEAEBEBECECEDEDEEEEEFEF). How he broke it down was using uppercase for all of the alternating E's and lowercase for the scale moving up in pitch. Here is where I would say that math comes into play with regards to music. I can take this notation of EAEAEBEB... and use numbers to represent where they fall in a scale. Now, some (non-musicians) might say that "numbers are never used with respects to notes, only rhythms." Well, I beg to differ. For instance, in Jazz many musicians use numbers to call out notes, instead of fumbling with writing out every single note on the page. So, if we had a C chord, and someone yelled out "play the 1st, 3rd and 5th" a person would play C then E then G. This works universally with any chord structure (if someone yelled out play the 1st, 3rd and 5th of a D chord, the person would the respected notes of that chord.)

This brings me to adding math into Hofstadter's sequencing from the book. If we were to take each note and associate a number to it starting with A equaling 1, B equaling 2 and so on, it would look like this:
515152525353545455555656 = EAEAEBEBECECEDEDEEEEEFEF
Then, you could break it down to:
(5 1-5 1) (5 2-5 2) (5 3-5 3) (5 4-5 4) (5 5-5 5) (5 6-5 6) like he does in the book. In essence, one could take an entire musical phrase and break it down in numbers, thus taking something like Hofstadter's idea of [2 n 2] and making a melodic line out of it. So, to some degree, there can be music made from numbers. This also gives rise to even more pattern recognition to take place.

-Bryan

(Not) Recognizing Our Patterns

When we wake up in the morning, we start a pattern (we sometimes call it a routine). We do our usual things, brush our teeth, shower, eat breakfast and so on. I pose this question to you, do you think we realize that we are going through patterns every second of our lives?

This then brought me to the idea of how our book Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies by Douglas Hofstadter was set up. I saw patterns happening all over the place. There was a pattern when the author finishes a section and moves to the next section (e.g. ends paragraph and section, new bold heading, starts new section etc...). A pattern was formed. I think that a main idea that the author was trying to convey was that everywhere we go, and everything we do, there is some type of pattern associated with everything we do.

An idea that the author brought up was on page 24 when he was talking about the 2121121212112... pattern, and how it creates a "child" pattern, which in turn creates another "child" pattern (all "child" means is that there is another pattern after the initial one has started). This brings us to recursion, and my favorite part of the chapter that the author talked about, the Fibonacci numbers (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 ...) These numbers are recursion at its finest. To find the next number, just take the previous two numbers and add them together (to find the next number after 13, add 8 + 13 = 21 etc...). So, recursion in itself is the process of backtracking to smaller patterns to figure out the entire pattern.

This idea of recursion comes into play when we (as humans) try to figure out complex ideas. We have to work at a smaller less complex level to be able to build up to the end result. We do this with logic, start with the smallest sentence (or idea, hopefully atomic sentences) and build on the system from there. I guess the motto, "aim big, start small" comes into play here. Which is a very key concept if one is to figure out how very complex patterns work.

-Bryan