A Little Numbo Never Hurt Anyone...

For this blog we had to read pages 138 to 154. This section in the book discussed how Defays set up the architecture of Numbo, a sample run of Numbo, and how Numbo compares to other computer models. He also discusses how strict comparisons between humans and Numbo are not possible, and this is what caught my eye (p. 151).

There are three reasons why Defays does not think that comparing Numbo and humans is a great possibility. The first one states that Numbo's knowledge base is impoverished and that major aspects of adults mathematical background is lacking in the Pnet. The second is that the way that humans tend to approach a problem have been ignored. He gave the example of the way the bricks are layed out in a linear fashion, which causes humans to read (left to right in this case) in one way, causing some subconscious desire to favor earlier bricks rather than latter ones. Finally, the third comparison was that of ad hoc solutions added to the architecture of Numbo.

This interested me because in figure III-6 Defays shows two different protocols happening side by side. Now, if a person were to go up to the protocols and look at them, I don't think that they could tell the differences from the human and machine protocols, on more complex problems. But, I do believe that on problems that only require a person to recall what the answer is, rather than try to figure it out, would easily be spotted by another person. He gives us the target 6, and bricks 3 3 17 11 22 at one point. Any human (that reads right to left) would get 6 using 3 + 3, whereas Numbo might use 17 - 11 or something else. As soon as we (as humans) have to start doing major computations is when it is harder to tell the difference between human and Numbo.

(Would this be the case with something like language? What about Jumbo? Would we be able to tell the difference with longer versus shorter words? What about word phrases?)

-Bryan