Books by author: Douglas Hofstadter

Many of the ideas that Hofstadter talks about are very similar to things I have been thinking about in my own research. His research group, however, stays within very restrictive domains which offer insight into the commingling of cognition and high-level perception, while I perceive my own work as bridging between low- and high-level perception. I'm intrigued by the use of "temperature" and probabilistically-run codelets in his systems, which are very closely related to my own blackboard systems.

This book is not easy to get through, and it is not at all easy to work through all of its ideas. I'm glad, however, that I pushed through it at this point in the development of my "education" and personal philosophy. For the most part, I'm sympathetic to Hofstadter's views, especially where they resonate with Minsky's. The dialogues in this book are very well crafted, and they offer good insight into the themes of the book's chapters. On a critical note, Hofstadter seems a overly proud of his own cleverness at times. I would love to see an expansion of some of the art and music ideas presented by someone with a deeper expertise, but for a book by a single author, Godel, Escher, Bach is remarkably deep. My favorite passage at this point is Prelude, Ant Fugue , which significantly enhanced my understanding of insect colonies and emergent behavior.