First Reflection

Douglas Hofstadter's breakdown of the process of analyzing a sequence was, I thought, very interesting.

First of all, I thought it did a good job of really demonstrating the thought processes he employed in solving a problem for which he knew no clear or set method of finding a solution. As expected, this seems to have involved a great deal of guessing, and even the guessing itself was examined as an interesting phenomenon--studying how the guesses may change as each successive element in the sequence was calculated.

Of course, this immediately reminded me of the first exercise in this class, being the Crypto Problem assignment. This is especially so because I was asked how I attempted to solve a crypto problem and had, at the time, realized that it was a bit difficult to explain exactly what I had tried to do in my mind. However, my method may have been fairy similar to Hofstadter's method. Mainly, it involved some guessing, along with some deeper analyzing, followed by backtracking, and then further followed by more guessing and analyzing. Of course, this basic process was repeated, in my mind and occasionally on paper, until a solution was found to all but one crypto problem assigned to us.

Probably the most interesting part of the assigned reading for me, was how one of the ideas was so similar to my strategy in solving the crypto problems. That was the strategy of reducing the sequence down into more basic sequences, or children sequences. In the case of the crypto problems, I did this, in a way. If nothing was obvious from first glance at a given problem, then my first course of action was making the data set smaller. I did this by actually writing down a new number set and new goal by working backwards from the originals.

For example, if my goal was 35, and one of the given numbers was a 5, I would reduce my goal to 30 and remove 5 from the number list. This created a smaller problem to work on, and once I solved it, I could easily get back to the original problem by using one operation and including the 5 once again. This would be, I suppose, an example of a depth-first analysis strategy, as I chose one number to remove from the set, and worked further based on the assumption that it could be solved from there. Sometimes this did not work, though, and I would choose a new number to remove from the beginning.