Beyond Brute-Force Dictionaries

In the pattern of letting the reader tip-toe in the dark while shouting: “A little bit more left, than you went backwards just before!” Hofstadter carries on with the Jumble puzzles throughout the second chapter. Jumbo, the program which he leaves us so unclear about, supposedly can solve simple and more complex anagrams by bonding letters, syllables and word parts together and forming ever more probable (but not necessarily more meaningful) chunks.

In metaphorically rich language, the author explains how such bonding between such atomic (letter) or molecule-like entities (syllables or intrinsically well fitting pairs or triplets) would carry out. That potential partners could first spark on sight of each other and eventually bond together if no other potential partner in sight would exert even more attraction. This way, all elements mingle first on a very small and detailed level and would then try to bond again with other more evolved structures further up in the hierarchy.

Yet, it does not seem quite plausible, how Hofstadter wants to realize such ranks of attraction level between the potential bonding partners. He suggests a very subjective approach, by bonding the first atomic elements with the help of his own intuitions. I would have rather suggested a probabilistic approach which had the underlying knowledge of how often certain letters proceed others in a certain language. This can be easily done by consulting just a small sample text and analyzing what letters normally occur in the environment of others.

Maybe Hofstadter is going to go into this, and I am being unjust to him. But I would have wished that he went into more detail of the actual realization than using two metaphors over like 5 pages to describe a process that most people have understood from the previous text.