Complexity_ A Guided Tour - Melanie Mitchell [97]
In the Slipnet the activation of length has decayed since the length description given to the R group hasn’t so far been found to be useful (i.e., it hasn’t yet been connected up with any other structures). In the Workspace, the salience of the group R’s length description 2 is correspondingly diminished.
The temperature is still fairly high, since the program is having a hard time making a single, coherent structure out of mrrjjj, something that it did easily with abc. That continuing difficulty, combined with strong focused pressure from the two sameness groups that have been built inside mrrjjj, caused the system to consider the a priori very unlikely idea of making a single-letter sameness group. This is represented by the dashed rectangle around the letter m.
FIGURE 13.8.
Figure 13.8: As a result of these combined pressures, the M sameness group was built to parallel the R and J groups in the same string. Its length of 1 has been attached as a description, activating length, which makes the program again consider the possibility that group length is relevant for this problem. This activation now more strongly attracts codelets to the objects representing group lengths. Some codelets have already been exploring relations between these objects and, probably due to focused pressures from abc to see successorship relationships, have built a successorship link between the 1 and the 2.
A consistent trio of letter ⇒ group correspondences have been made, and as a result of these promising new structures the temperature has fallen to the relatively low value of 36, which in turn helps to lock in this emerging view.
If the program were to halt at this point, it would produce the answer mrrkkk, which is its most frequent answer (see figure 13.12).
Figure 13.9: As a result of length’s continued activity, length descriptions have been attached to the remaining two groups in the problem, jjj and abc, and a successorship link between the 2 and the 3 (for which there is much focused pressure coming from both abc and the emerging view of mrrjjj) is being considered. Other less likely candidate structures (a bc group and a c–j correspondence) continue to be considered, though at considerably less urgency than earlier, now that a coherent perception of the problem is emerging and the temperature is relatively low.
Figure 13.10: The link between the 2 and the 3 was built, which, in conjunction with focused pressure from the abc successor group, allowed codelets to propose and build a whole-string group based on successorship links, here between numbers rather than between letters. This group is represented by a large solid rectangle surrounding the three sameness groups. Also, a correspondence (dotted vertical line to the right of the two strings) is being considered between the two whole-string groups abc and mrrjjj.
FIGURE 13.9.
FIGURE 13.10.
Ironically, just as these sophisticated ideas seem to be converging, a small renegade codelet, totally unaware of the global movement, has had some good luck: its bid to knock down the c–J correspondence and replace it with a c–j correspondence was successful. Of course, this is a setback on the global level; while the temperature would have gone down significantly because of the strong mrrjjj group that was built, its decrease was offset by the now nonparallel set of correspondences linking together the two strings. If the program were forced to stop at this point, it would answer mrrjjk, since at this point, the object that changed, the c, is seen as corresponding to the letter