But that's unsatisfying, because it doesn't acknowledge features such as sequence, successorship, and the special roles of a and z as first and last. A more subtle interpretation yields the more satisfying answer wyz, in which the role of d as the successor to c in an ascending sequence anchored at the beginning of the alphabet mirrors that of w as the predecessor of x in a descending sequence anchored at the end of the alphabet. The challenge for Copycat, the program built to solve this class of problem, was not only to be able to arrive at the answer wyz but to get there in the s ame way humans do. Hofstadter reports that just as human subjects usually answer xyd but are more satisfied when they sometimes discover wyz, so it is with Copycat. These are, of course, dangerously loaded terms.
Links encode distances between pairs of concepts.
The distances vary dynamically under the influence of another network, called the Workspace. Many agents are always running. They're chosen randomly from a larger population of agents scheduled to run. Hofstadter boldly claims that Copycat captures fundamental processes of creative intelligence. That's radical enough, but what will make this book even more controversial is that he considers and violently rejects the models put forward by other cognitive scientists.