Bonds, Chains, And Gloms Oh My

What I found particularly interesting about Hofstadter’s brief explanation of Jumbo is the process that Jumbo goes through to form its possible word candidates for the “Jumble” puzzle. As Hofstadter explains it isn’t necessarily if the word formed is correct, but the process by which the word is formed. This suggests to me that Jumbo doesn’t actually solve the “Jumble” puzzle but tries to form words using the anagrams presented.
What really peaked my interest was the partial rule base that Hofstadter provided in this section. In this he states that his rule base wasn’t based on any kind of letter to letter frequency but only on priorities that he himself believes viable in his own process for forming words in the “Jumble”.

I believe that Hofstadter has thought deeply about his own process for forming words using anagrams. I however don’t know if that is exactly how I form words trying to solve anagrams. Maybe on some level, it is very similar to the process that I use. I will certainly have to think more about it to come to any kind of conclusion on the differences between his process and my own.

After reading this section it reminded me about something that I had seen on the internet a few years ago. Research at Cambridge had discovered that it doesn’t matter the order of the letters as long as the first and last letter of a word are correct, people would have a tendency to figure the word out with almost no effort. This is not the original article but here is a link to an example of this.

http://www.mylittleportal.com/mixed-letters-still-readable