pages 97 to 111

From this section of the book I most enjoyed the concept of a "terraced scan".
Hostadter uses the example of going into a bookstore and rather than reading each and every book cover to cover before deciding which book one is actually interested in, one tends to sort out so very many books by the blink of an eye. We are able to categorize things at extremely high speeds. Of course we are sometimes wrong but in general this kind of approach facilitates our everyday life quite a lot. In principle only the "interesting" reach higher levels of cognition.
However, Hofstadter pointed out that this sorting out is actually not a binary decision; instead every "thread" returns a value indicating how interesting or not interesting an occurrence is.
Therefore if at first glance, occurrence A seems to be the most interesting but after more thorough research turns out to actually not be, one can anytime return to occurrence B which at first was categorized as less interesting.
This is one of the core principles that Hofstadter is trying to implement into his artificial intelligence research project "Jumbo".
Basically this approach is "merely" dealing with search strategies. I know that various A.I. researches believe that intelligence is "merely" achieved by efficient search strategies.
But I am not so sure about this. I am sure that research on search strategies will be able to significantly enhance artificial systems. But I doubt that it will be sufficient in order to create anything truly intelligent. Emotions and intuition seem to me to be equally important.