Maybe he felt that the difference between Einstein and a village idiot was larger than between a village idiot and a chimp. Chimps can be pretty clever.
Or, maybe he thought that the right end of the scale, where the line suddenly becomes dotted, should be the location of the rightmost point that represents something real. It’s very conventional to switch from a solid to a dotted line to represent a switch from confirmed data to projections.
But I don’t buy the idea of intelligence as a scalar value.
Did Hofstadter explain the remark?
Maybe he felt that the difference between Einstein and a village idiot was larger than between a village idiot and a chimp. Chimps can be pretty clever.
Or, maybe he thought that the right end of the scale, where the line suddenly becomes dotted, should be the location of the rightmost point that represents something real. It’s very conventional to switch from a solid to a dotted line to represent a switch from confirmed data to projections.
But I don’t buy the idea of intelligence as a scalar value.