The case
A4, §5: “his mother produces a version that violates many of them: not 28 lines, not three syllables per line, doesn’t reproduce the beginning at the end … over time, he concludes that her version may be the best of all because it has a kind of vitality or ‘pizzazz’ that the formally precise versions lack.” And: “Hofstadter allows the experiment to defeat his initial criterion.”
What it can show
That a judged-best rendering can preserve fewer constraints than its rivals, so quality is not the count of preserved constraints (CLAIM-020). It cannot say what “pizzazz” is. A4 offered “higher-order properties—voice, energy, humor, affection—that may emerge from the whole”, which is close to what the manuscript’s relational observables later try to name. It was dropped after A4, apparently inadvertently, and is the exchange’s only documented case of a form-violating rendering winning.