Readers of earlier works by Douglas Hofstadter will find this book a natural extension of his style and his ideas about creativity and analogy; in addition, psychologists, philosophers, and artificial-intelligence researchers will find in this elaborate web of ingenious ideas a deep and challenging new view of mind.
Since 1977, Hofstadter, the author of Godel, Escher, Bach, and his students have been developing computer models of discovery, creation, and analogical thought. What has emerged is a sophisticated and unorthodox vision of the mind in which perception, at an abstract level, is the key: perception of situations, of patterns, of patterns among patterns. This book conveys this bold vision to a broad public. Illustrations.
| List of Illustrations | ||
| Prologue: The Why, the When, the Where, and the Who of This Book | 1 | |
| Ch. 1 | To Seek Whence Cometh a Sequence | 13 |
| Preface 2: The Unconscious Juggling of Mental Objects | 87 | |
| Ch. 2 | The Architecture of Jumbo | 97 |
| Preface 3: Arithmetical Play and Nondeterminism | 127 | |
| Ch. 3 | Numbo: A Study in Cognition and Recognition | 131 |
| Preface 4: The Ineradicable Eliza Effect and Its Dangers | 155 | |
| Ch. 4 | High-level Perception, Representation, and Analogy: A Critique of Artificial-intelligence Methodology | 169 |
| Preface 5: Conceptual Halos and Slippability | 195 | |
| Ch. 5 | The Copycat Project: A Model of Mental Fluidity and Analogy-making | 205 |
| Preface 6: Two Early AI Approaches to Analogy | 269 | |
| Ch. 6 | Perspectives on Copycat: Comparisons with Recent Work | 275 |
| Preface 7: Retrieval of Old and Invention of New Analogies | 301 | |
| Ch. 7 | Prolegomena to Any Future Metacat | 307 |
| Preface 8: Analogy-making in a Coffeehouse | 319 | |
| Ch. 8 | Tabletop, BattleOp, Ob-Platte, Potelbat, Belpatto, Platobet | 323 |
| Preface 9: The Knotty Problem of Evaluating Research in AI and Cognitive Science | 359 | |
| Ch. 9 | The Emergent Personality of Tabletop, a Perception-based Model of Analogy-making | 377 |
| Preface 10: The Intoxicating World of Alphabets and Their Styles | 401 | |
| Ch. 10 | Letter Spirit: Esthetic Perception and Creative Play in the Rich Microcosm of the Roman Alphabet | 407 |
| Epilogue: On Computers, Creativity, Credit, Brain Mechanisms, and the Turing Test | 467 | |
| References | 493 | |
| Index | 502 |
Overview
Readers of earlier works by Douglas Hofstadter will find this book a natural extension of his style and his ideas about creativity and analogy; in addition, psychologists, philosophers, and artificial-intelligence researchers will find in this elaborate web of ingenious ideas a deep and challenging new view of mind.
Since 1977, Hofstadter, the author of Godel, Escher, Bach, and his students have been developing computer models of discovery, creation, and analogical ...