Eliza Effect
I enjoyed the section of the book that described the Eliza Effect. Which is when people read to much into what a computer displays or does and gives it more credit then it probably should.
For example the web site I use to host my blog, Tumblr, has a large image stating “Welcome Back” on its homepage. Thinking the site has any actual meaning behind displaying it would be falling to the Eliza Effect.
This can then be related to the feeling that the general public have that computers are smart. Hofstadter disagrees that a novel can be written by a computer. He says a computer can’t understand any word as well as a human can and by combining thousands of words into a novel is impossible for a computer to do.
The program described in the book “wrote” a book only because it had been programmed with thousands of rules and then would asked Scott French, writer of the program, questions on how to proceed. This hardly counts as writing a novel by itself but add on top of this that Scott French would change some words and correct some misspellings.
A computer given credit for writing a novel by looking up words in a database and asking a human questions, reminds me of the following saying. It has been said that a 1000 monkeys with 1000 typewriters given infinite time would eventually create the entire works of Shakespeare.
