Hofstadter is kind-of a romantic.

Jumbo is an artificial intelligence endeavor with aims to model cognition as a series of concurrent modules all sort-of aiming at the same place. At least in problem solving. Against my frowning, Hofstadter mentions that he does not seek to understand the microscopic mechanisms underlying brain activity and thought, but rather would try to pick apart the symbolic strata of information being pushed around in the mind.

Jumbo's problem domain is anagrams (a set of jumbled letters which must be arranged into a real word in order to solve the puzzle). Instead of having the program simply sort out the options from the full list of possible permutations, Hofstadter's architecture attempts to use a technique similar to chemical bonding in the natural world (also similar to symmballs..).

By visualizing that each letters has a set of "good" fits and "bad" fits, such as "t" to "h" to fit into "th", Jumbo builds words out of many smaller parts -- called gloms. Letters are weighted according to their use in the language -- English in this case. Simple on paper, but probably required alot of effort to balance in a way that produced reasonable results.

I especially like Hofstadter's intuition about imagining mind activity in terms of analogies of nature. In fact, it seems like one of the things he's best at is showing us that sort-of Zen quality of the universe -- that everything is related. He says that, like the chemical bonds found in the natural laws, a letter is able to shift between gloms should the need arise. A letter is also very attracted to some other letters but not very attracted at all to other letters -- just like certain molecules.