Look, Hofstadter is in love with his brilliance... again! Why do I keep reading his crap? ( )

Four-fifths of this book is an incisive and convincing takedown of some current trends in the field that used to be called 'AI.' Hofstadter's specialty and bias is toward 'microdomains,' wherein he asks computers to develop associations ('analogies') between extremely simple entities, encoding for shape, proximity, reflection, and other patterns.

The section on Tabletop is worth the price of the book.

He makes a number of forays along the way, striking out at colleagues in the field who take different approaches; some of this is insightful and convincing, but some of it leaves me feeling like I have witnessed one side of an academic spat. Hofstadter certainly makes his point that a lot of what popularly passes for AI is not much more than speech recognition, and does not usefully advance (as his own work absolutely does) real understanding of how a machine might mimic 'thought' (particularly 'creative thought') and 'understanding.'

The latter fifth of the book provides a titillating look at then-unfinished work on applying some of these concepts to typographic design. Here Hofstadter overextends his expertise in type design a little (as he does in the field of poetry, in his book Le Ton Beau de Marot), but his enthusiasm is infectious and I admire the courage of his omnivorous intellect.
(john) ( )