false 24113 26 Twenty years after it topped the bestseller charts, Douglas R. Hofstadter's <I>Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid</I> is still something of a marvel. Besides being a profound and entertaining meditation on human thought and creativity, this book looks at the surprising points of contact between the music of Bach, the artwork of Escher, and the mathematics of Gödel. It also looks at the prospects for computers and artificial intelligence (AI) for mimicking human thought. For the general reader and the computer techie alike, this book still sets a standard for thinking about the future of computers and their relation to the way we think.<p> Hofstadter's great achievement in <I>Gödel, Escher, Bach</I> was making abstruse mathematical topics (like undecidability, recursion, and 'strange loops') accessible and remarkably entertaining. Borrowing a page from Lewis Carroll (who might well have been a fan of this book), each chapter presents dialogue between the Tortoise and Achilles, as well as other characters who dramatize concepts discussed later in more detail. Allusions to Bach's music (centering on his <I>Musical Offering</I>) and Escher's continually paradoxical artwork are plentiful here. This more approachable material lets the author delve into serious number theory (concentrating on the ramifications of Gödel's Theorem of Incompleteness) while stopping along the way to ponder the work of a host of other mathematicians, artists, and thinkers.<p> The world has moved on since 1979, of course. The book predicted that computers probably won't ever beat humans in chess, though Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov in 1997. And the vinyl record, which serves for some of Hofstadter's best analogies, is now left to collectors. Sections on recursion and the graphs of certain functions from physics look tantalizing, like the fractals of recent chaos theory. And AI has moved on, of course, with mixed results. Yet <I>Gödel, Escher, Bach</I> remains a remarkable achievement. Its intellectual range and ability to let us visualize difficult mathematical concepts help make it one of this century's best for anyone who's interested in computers and their potential for <I>real</I> intelligence. <I>--Richard Dragan</I><p> <B>Topics Covered</B>: J.S. Bach, M.C. Escher, Kurt Gödel: biographical information and work, artificial intelligence (AI) history and theories, strange loops and tangled hierarchies, formal and informal systems, number theory, form in mathematics, figure and ground, consistency, completeness, Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry, recursive structures, theories of meaning, propositional calculus, typographical number theory, Zen and mathematics, levels of description and computers; theory of mind: neurons, minds and thoughts; undecidability; self-reference and self-representation; Turing test for machine intelligence. 850076 1979 Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid total:2826|5:1538|4:850|3:321|2:88|1:29| 2826 12258 5568 430 3 15 false false Wed Mar 19 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Sun Jul 01 22:04:17 -0700 2007 Fri Mar 28 20:49:51 -0700 2008 GEB, you'll see that the first thing Douglas Hofstadter does in the introduction - the very first thing - is grouse that nobody seems to understand what his book is about. Not even its publishers or readers who just absolutely love it. A q...more...]]> 5 4 false false Fri Jan 01 00:00:00 -0800 1999 Thu Aug 23 14:22:56 -0700 2007 Thu Aug 23 14:39:45 -0700 2007
Rabbit: I have been recently reading a book which helps me to counter many of your points Dante. You should take a l...more...]]> 4 4 false false Fri Jan 01 00:00:00 -0800 1982 Sun Dec 14 14:10:29 -0800 2008 Tue Dec 16 08:14:37 -0800 2008 more...]]> 5 3 false false Wed Jun 27 17:35:44 -0700 2007 Sat Jun 30 10:23:06 -0700 2007
The central thesis is that under certain conditions sufficiently complex, recursive self-editing systems can develop arbitrarily complex behavior without...more...]]> 3 2 false false Sun Mar 30 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Sun Mar 30 16:47:38 -0700 2008 Sun Mar 30 17:05:10 -0700 2008 more...]]> 5 2 false false Wed Apr 01 00:00:00 -0800 1998 Fri Jun 22 09:42:54 -0700 2007 Fri Jun 22 11:11:09 -0700 2007 Synopsis: Two books, interwoven. The first is a series of comedic dialogues in which characters created by Lewis Carrol engage in friendly battles of wit and skill, or just conversations, each dialogue being modeled after music by Johann Sebastian Bach. The second is a prosaic exploration of th...more...]]> 2 2 false false Fri Jul 27 19:40:07 -0700 2007 Sat Jul 28 12:16:41 -0700 2007
I wanted to like this book. In fact, I still do. I don't mind authorial self-indulgence as a rule. I didn't mind feeling ineducable much of the the time (I do). But frankly, I found all the ...more...]]> 4 2 false false Thu Sep 13 17:57:05 -0700 2007 Thu Sep 13 17:59:11 -0700 2007 more...]]> 5 1 false false Mon Jul 07 18:40:46 -0700 2008 Fri Jul 24 14:34:36 -0700 2009
Introduction

8-10: double function ("double meaning") as canon and impossible figure.

15: emplacement, being "sucked in" -> p....more...]]> 5 1 false false Tue Jul 29 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Sun Jun 29 19:53:01 -0700 2008 Fri Aug 01 00:55:50 -0700 2008
But what are its to...more...]]> 5 1 false false Sat Sep 01 00:00:00 -0700 2007 Sat Aug 11 16:17:20 -0700 2007 Wed Sep 19 14:22:54 -0700 2007 GEB is that it's decidedly unpretentious, almost certainly written to be ...more...]]> 5 1 false false Sat Jul 01 00:00:00 -0700 2006 Fri Aug 10 13:43:48 -0700 2007 Tue Aug 14 15:18:37 -0700 2007 artificial intelligence, and doesn't leave you behind. He uses a good deal of graphic illustrations in his discussions, which are pretty welcome in some ...more...]]> 4 1 false false Sun May 06 18:36:05 -0700 2007 Tue Jul 17 17:55:51 -0700 2007 Godel, Escher, Bach is a majestic feat in bringing abstract science down to an understandable and even enjoyable level. Hofstadter uses lucid prose to explain such complicated (and often dry) issues as formal systems, computer programming, and metamathematics. The dia...more...]]> 4 1 false false Wed Jun 27 05:09:04 -0700 2007 Fri Sep 18 14:38:53 -0700 2009 ON HOLD?

I've been "currently reading" since ... December 2005? A while now, in any case...

Deep geekery. Let's build logic from its component parts. And then after by-hand fabricating that nomenclature, we'll use it to talk about intelligence, problem-solving, heu...more...]]> 5 0 false false Mon Jul 07 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Mon Jan 26 18:18:38 -0800 2009 Tue Jan 27 09:12:18 -0800 2009 more...]]> 4 0 false false Tue Jul 01 00:00:00 -0700 2008 Mon Jan 05 21:12:37 -0800 2009 Mon Jan 05 21:50:14 -0800 2009
...more...]]> 5 0 false false Thu Oct 01 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Sat Oct 03 00:55:55 -0700 2009 Sat Oct 03 12:01:41 -0700 2009 Gödel, Escher, Bach (or GEB) thirty years after it was originally published, I am astonished at how well it has aged. I am not in the least surprised, however, that the book remains widely misunderstood, particularly among those who sing its praise. In a sense, it having won...more...]]> 4 0 false false Wed Aug 19 01:32:56 -0700 2009 Wed Aug 19 01:57:11 -0700 2009 more...]]> 5 1 false false Tue Aug 14 00:00:00 -0700 2007 Fri Aug 14 17:01:52 -0700 2009 Fri Aug 14 17:03:59 -0700 2009 more...]]> 0 1 false false Mon Sep 17 19:14:52 -0700 2007 Mon Sep 17 19:45:44 -0700 2007 more...]]>