Those readers hoping for the witty high of Gödel, Escher, Bach will be disappointed: this book is a workhorse.
It is a technical tome, yet it still has humor: Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought. Now, after 15 years, Hofstadter has published another major book. He occasionally published his results in very technical journals, but he wrote little for the dedicated lay reader. He began the book while a graduate student, and after its wild and unexpected success he went back to the lab and spent decades attempting to make his ideas work in real systems. As abruptly as Hofstadter burst on the scene, he disappeared. But nearly every other author writing since in the same area has referred at least once to the legendary Gödel, Escher, Bach. The book became a bestseller, and in the 1980s, it could be found on the bookshelves of anyone who had anything to do with the new fields of cybernetics, artificial intelligence, and computer science - although how many read it, or understood more than a third of it is unclear.
And it was all electronically typeset by its hackerish author. Titled Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, it was a rambling 777-page magnum opus crowded with dense diagrams about feedback loops, witty parables about knowledge, and intellectual puns that had mathematicians in stitches. _In 1979, Douglas Hofstadter burst into public consciousness with a book so out of the ordinary it won a Pulitzer Prize for its young first-time author. A talk with the most remarkable researcher in artificial intelligence today, Douglas Hofstadter, the author of Gödel, Escher, Bach.
0 kommentar(er)
