Conceptual Halo (Preface 5)

In this section, Hofstadter discusses the conceptual halo and an expansion of his Seek-Whence program into his Copycat project. The conceptual halo seems to be nearly identical to the conceptual sphere he talked about in previous chapters. The First Lady of England example or the words in different languages could be moved into the section where he first discusses the conceptual sphere and I don't think it would make any difference to the reader. I am not sure why he decided to change the name from conceptual sphere to halo with what seems to be the same idea. The only difference is how he gives examples with the "slips" where a person may say the wrong word or combine two words when they have two parallel thoughts running in their head. But this is merely just a new kind of example that he brings up.

Hofstadter then introduces the groundwork for another one of his projects, Copycat. The Copycat program seems to take the base idea of patterns from Seek-Whence and combines them with the analogy-making idea he discussed in the previous chapter. Then, for which seems like nothing more than a "why not?" reason, Hofstadter changes the patterns of numbers to letters. This project seems more interesting than the previous Numbo and Jumbo projects, just because it has more of a puzzle or riddle feel to them. It could just be that these problems are presented in a sentence form, but it just seems like it has a more interesting feel to them.