Douglas Hofstadter

Work

At Indiana University at Bloomington he co-authored with Melanie Mitchell and others, a cognitive model of "high-level perception", Copycat, and several other models of analogy making and cognition. The Copycat project has since grown into 'Metacat' and has been worked on by Hofstadter and several assistants. A 2002 overview can be found here (PDF).

Related Topics:
Melanie Mitchell - Cognitive model - Copycat - Analogy making - Cognition

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Hofstadter has not published much in conventional academic journals (except during his early physics career, see below), preferring the freedom of expression of large books of collected ideas. As such, his great influence on computer science is somewhat subversive and underground - his work has inspired countless research projects, but is not always formally referenced.

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When Martin Gardner retired from writing his Mathematical Games column for Scientific American magazine, Hofstadter succeeded him with a column entitled Metamagical Themas (an anagram of "Mathematical Games"). Hofstadter also invented the concept of Reviews of This Book, a book containing nothing but cross-referenced reviews of itself (the idea was introduced in Metamagical Themas):

Related Topics:
Martin Gardner - Mathematical Games - Scientific American - Metamagical Themas

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:" is just a fantasy of mine. I would love to see a book consisting of nothing but a collection of reviews of it that appeared (after its publication, of course) in major newspapers and magazines. It sounds paradoxical, but it could be arranged with a lot of planning and hard work. First, a group of major journals would all have to agree to run reviews of the book by the various contributors to the book. Then all the reviewers would begin writing. But they would have to mail off their various drafts to all the other reviewers very regularly so that all the reviews could evolve together, and thus eventually reach a stable state of a kind known in physics as a "Hartree-Fock self-consistent solution". Then the book could be published, after which its reviews would come out in their respective journals, as per arrangement."

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