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Loading... GODEL, ESCHER, BACH: AN ETERNAL GOLDEN BRAID.by Douglas R.: Hofstadter
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. LTJinja | May 2, 2009 |   DNF/still reading. (  )FMRox | Apr 5, 2009 |  Hofstadter argues his perspective on the nature of the mind and the potential of artificial intelligence, particularly with regards to how it relates to Gödel's Theorem (which is essentially about the number-theoretical equivalent of the statment "This sentence is false"). He educates the reader in all the background necessary to understand his arguments, which is a pretty incredible feat for a book that could easily have been purely technical. He goes off on frequent tangents, whimsical diversions and involved analogies (including illustrating his ideas with examples from Escher, Bach, genetics, language and Zen Buddhism). This book is enormous. It's not just 750 pages; it's 750 pages of a very dense book on complex topics. It's accessible to any layperson who wants to make the effort, and it's worth the time involved, but don't start it unless you're willing to commit a lot of time to reading it. I highly recommend getting the 1990's anniversary edition, as the new introduction by the author puts the book into perspective and clearly outlines his argument and the direction it will take, something woefully neglected in the original book. ( )comfypants | Mar 22, 2009 | 1  This hurts my tiny brain. stephenaturton | Mar 9, 2009 | An extraordinary romp through self-reference and patterns using mathematics, art, and music as his examples. Funny, witty, erudite and a classic. I have read it twice (the original edition and this newer edition with a new preface) and have no doubt that I will read it again. (  )RicDay | Feb 6, 2009 | 0.063 seconds to build listing
Amazon.com (ISBN 0465026567, Paperback)Twenty years after it topped the bestseller charts, Douglas R. Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid 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.Hofstadter's great achievement in Gödel, Escher, Bach 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 Musical Offering) 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. 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 Gödel, Escher, Bach 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 real intelligence. --Richard Dragan Topics Covered: 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. (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:01 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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Finally a popular-science book which does not assume you're a dummy. (