I thought the program sounded intriguing (sorry, I had to say it!); and it sort of reminded me of those text adventure games because it has a running commentary. After playing with it, I got kind of bored; it’s just letters that you type into the program to see what patterns it can make. I didn’t see how it could be helpful, so I reread the paper and found this: “Rather, strings should be viewed as representing idealized situations involving abstract categories and relations” (8). However, I’m still having trouble thinking of what sort of situations this would entail… Is it just what we talked about in class regarding the analogy web of Nixon-war-hippies-drugs?
Also, I was disappointed when the program couldn’t come up with a satisfactory (by its own standards) answer to the first problem with which I presented it – I think it may have been something really similar to the first example shown in the paper, a string from the xyz family. Unfortunately I can’t remember exactly what input I gave, but I know that it didn’t respond with what I thought was an obvious answer. I thought that the program was supposed to give obvious answers and also clever answers that aren’t immediately apparent to us.
Overall, though, I was impressed with the program’s ability of self-awareness, and that it can change its own concepts and analogies, which are stored in its memory (also impressive), into ones that it finds more helpful as it continues to run.