In Gödel, Escher, Bach, Prof. Hofstadter has quoted a passage from Dean Wooldridge’s book Mechanical Man, where he details an experiment involving the egg-laying habits of wasps of the genus Sphex. When it is time for the wasp to lay eggs, she finds and paralyzes a cricket with her venom, and then drags it into a burrow. She lays her eggs alongside the cricket, closes the burrow, and flies away, never to return. The eggs soon hatch, and the grubs consume the paralyzed cricket. Specifically, to bring the cricket into the burrow, the wasp performs the following steps in order:

1. Bring the cricket to the mouth of the burrow.
2. Enter the burrow and make an inspection of sorts.
3. Come out of the burrow and drag the cricket inside.

Wooldridge pointed out that though it might seem to us that the wasp displays intelligent behaviour, it is merely an instinctive routine. This was demonstrated in the experiment by moving the paralyzed cricket a few inches away from the burrow while the wasp had gone inside to perform the inspection. Upon emerging from the burrow, the wasp, instead of bringing the cricket inside, moves it only up to the mouth of the burrow, and once again goes inside to make the inspection. If the cricket is moved once more, the wasp will perform the same ritual yet again.

That is to say, the wasp is “hard-coded” to perform steps 1 through 3 in order, and if she is not able to find the cricket at the mouth of the burrow during step 3, she restarts the entire procedure from scratch. Never once does she think of pulling the cricket straight in. On one occasion this procedure was repeated forty times, always with the same result.

In GEB, the entire point of this passage was to demonstrate that lesser intelligences do not have the capability to generalize, and by the time I finished reading it, I was feeling quite smug about the ol’ noggin. Stupid wasp. I would have taken the cricket inside in one swift move. Why, I’m so smart I would have found a way to take four.

Preoccupied with thoughts of such profundity, I hadn’t noticed that I had picked up and slightly scrambled a perfectly innocent Rubik’s Cube that was lying in front of me, minding its own business. Here’s the thing about me and the Rubik’s Cube - I just know a single sequence of beginner-friendly algorithms that solves it from any state. It takes about 3 minutes and somewhere in the vicinity of 140 moves, and cares not the least about the initial state of the cube.

There I was, a scrambled cube in my hand, knowing full well that it is within ten moves from the solved state, but without a clue towards reversing what I had wrought upon it. Following my algorithms had never been so painful, since for a while, every single move I made took the cube further and further away from the hallowed solved state. It were as if the wasp had proceeded to kick the cricket away, buried it under leaves, and gone on to hunt a new cricket entirely.

I’m not sure what I learned from this experience. Suffice it to say, I won’t be dissing bugs any time soon.