In the latest section of the book that was read this weekend, Hofstadter discusses how difficult it is to represent rules realistically in a program. He mentions, as part of this, giving templates the ability to have parts of them changed--what he refers to as "fluidifying." He also talks much about the importance of perception in recognizing patterns, and walks through the process of discovering different kinds of glues that bind certain elements of a sequence together, and developing those into islands that are used to understand the relationships in a sequence.
Another thing he touches on in this reading is something he already discussed earlier, but with the examples given in this section, it becomes much clearer how important the realization is. That realization is that sequences are truly difficult to interpret when given a set of elements that is too small. His analogy of trying to guess the future personality of an infant compared to guessing the future personality of a teenager was very powerful in displaying this important concept.
The reading was interesting for me, because I used to be very fond of this type of mathematics game when I was younger, and I spent a lot of time trying to find patterns, although I suppose not to the same extent as Hofstadter did. The process of finding patterns based on successor-ship, predecessor-ship, sameness, and run-ups/run-downs was interesting because as I did these types of puzzles, I never actually thought about how I was thinking about them, but after reading this, it seems very accurate. The fact that no one ever told me how to think about these puzzles and that most people seem to solve these things in the same way is interesting to me.
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