“To dare every day to be irreverent and bold. To dare to preserve the randomness of mind which in children produces strange and wonderful new thoughts and forms. To continually scramble the familiar and bring the old into new juxtaposition.”
-- Gordon Webber
-- Eric Hoffer
Hofstadter talks about the intricacies of Jumbo and how it is a self-driven system, in that it has a flow of operation which is determined by factors of varying urgency and random numbers. He also claims that because of the great deal of randomness in his system that it may appear less 'intelligent' than it actually is. He does defend Jumbo by explaining that much of what we do is also random. Such things as deciding where to sit in a room, what to have for lunch, or what to wear on any given day (this is the case, at least, for most of the guys I know) have many weighted factors that may help you decide but these decisions can also be heavy with randomness. It is not in most people's best interest to take the time to rationalize out what their most viable option is for every decision they make. Just because we may not always be aware or willing to admit that many of our decisions are randomly driven, does not detract from our intelligence and could be an argument through simile for possible machine intelligence in Jumbo, or AI programs with randomness.
I enjoy that his defense of an intelligence that Jumbo may have is followed by a description of its epiphenomenal intelligence. He states that its intelligence, if any, was not intentional from its creators and emerged from the way in which the "small program-fragments interct with each other." I believe that our intelligence arises the same way, which could further link human and machine intelligence. I'm an advocate against "thinkodynamics", as Hofstadter puts it, or "laws governing thoughts at their own level." I am a staunch believer that our intelligence and our consciousness, if they differ, arose from largely random interactions between seperate parts, or functionings, of our brain, which themselves arose from more basic interactions among neurons.
So I do not believe that randomness in a system must deny that system of intelligence but perhaps that any system that is truly intelligent does have randomness in it. I believe that Hofstadter's views on entropy in machine and human systems and their relation to possible intelligence are ones that should be more widely considered by students and other computer scientists.
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