full transcript

From the Ted Talk by Danny Hillis: Back to the future (of 1994)

Unscramble the Blue Letters


So an organism could, for instance, lraen not to eat a certain kind of friut because it tasted bad and it got sick last time it ate it. That could haeppn within the lifetime of a single organism, whereas before they'd built these special information processing structures, that would have had to be learned evolutionarily over hundreds of taoudhsns of years by the individuals dying off that ate that kind of fruit. So that nervous system, the fact that they built these special information structures, tremendously sped up the whole prscoes of eotuoilvn. Because evolution could now happen within an individual. It could happen in learning time scales.

Open Cloze


So an organism could, for instance, _____ not to eat a certain kind of _____ because it tasted bad and it got sick last time it ate it. That could ______ within the lifetime of a single organism, whereas before they'd built these special information processing structures, that would have had to be learned evolutionarily over hundreds of _________ of years by the individuals dying off that ate that kind of fruit. So that nervous system, the fact that they built these special information structures, tremendously sped up the whole _______ of _________. Because evolution could now happen within an individual. It could happen in learning time scales.

Solution


  1. happen
  2. learn
  3. thousands
  4. fruit
  5. process
  6. evolution

Original Text


So an organism could, for instance, learn not to eat a certain kind of fruit because it tasted bad and it got sick last time it ate it. That could happen within the lifetime of a single organism, whereas before they'd built these special information processing structures, that would have had to be learned evolutionarily over hundreds of thousands of years by the individuals dying off that ate that kind of fruit. So that nervous system, the fact that they built these special information structures, tremendously sped up the whole process of evolution. Because evolution could now happen within an individual. It could happen in learning time scales.

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations


ngrams of length 2

collocation frequency
billion years 5
random sequences 5
time scale 4
drops learned 2
interesting step 2
single organism 2
special structures 2
information processing 2
time span 2
special information 2
time scales 2
confused idea 2
million years 2
design computers 2
sorting numbers 2


Important Words


  1. ate
  2. bad
  3. built
  4. dying
  5. eat
  6. evolution
  7. evolutionarily
  8. fact
  9. fruit
  10. happen
  11. hundreds
  12. individual
  13. individuals
  14. information
  15. instance
  16. kind
  17. learn
  18. learned
  19. learning
  20. lifetime
  21. nervous
  22. organism
  23. process
  24. processing
  25. scales
  26. sick
  27. single
  28. special
  29. sped
  30. structures
  31. system
  32. tasted
  33. thousands
  34. time
  35. tremendously
  36. years