Esthetics

For this reading assignment, I was most interested in how Hofstadter regretted his attempts at creating a sequence-analyzing program as part of a competition with his university students. Mainly, his reason for being upset was interesting because it marks the difference between true artificial intelligence and the illusion of artificial intelligence, as I also believe it to be.

As I see it, most artificial intelligence is truly just an illusion of genuine artificial intelligence, because the software that calculates decisions based purely on mathematical criteria is a program which does not actually exhibit the types of thought processes that a human being does when making a decision that requires any real thought. As Hofstadter walked the reader through an example of how simply knowledge could not be the only tool employed in solving problems requiring an advanced degree of intelligence, I experienced the same sort of problems that he had. Namely, this problem was one relating to esthetics. It was difficult for me, as it was for him long ago, to actually see a pattern where it should have actually been quite easy.

I thought the main idea of this was to show how heuristics we use when attempting to solve problems as humans can either help or harm us. In this example, it was difficult to discern the pattern because of how most people, I think, are used to recognizing certain types of patterns, such as the same numbers being side-by-side. However, I also believe this can work in the opposite way—some sequences are also much faster to decipher because of this ability to instantly recognize certain patterns, to the extent that they require very little knowledge of math and calculation. Because of this, I do believe that artificial intelligence systems should attempt to incorporate the same types of heuristics in their attempts to problem-solve, in order to achieve true artificial intelligence.