Why Linear Thinking is Bollocks (and thank goodness I can't do it)
at Mason and Rook Hotel, DC My book club has invested more than a year trying to define intelligence, consciousness, meaning, emergence. Dr. Douglas R. Hofstadter, in his book Godel, Escher, Bach - an Eternal Golden Braid , said: "In the early days it was assumed that knowledge came in sentence-like packets, and that the best way to implant knowledge into a program was to develop a simple way of translating facts into small passive packets of data. Then every fact would simply be a piece of data, accessible to the programs using it. This is exemplified by chess programs, where board Positions are coded into matrices or lists of some sort and stored efficiently in memory where they can be retrieved and acted upon by subroutines. The fact that human beings store facts in a more complicated way was known to psychologists for quite a while and has only recently been rediscovered by AI workers, who are now confronting the problems of "chunked" knowle...