Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas R. Hofstadter

Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter

On the surface, this book contains all the topics in which I have a strong interest: mathematical logic, theories of computation, artificial intelligence, programming, music, art, etc. As an undergraduate student, some of my favourite courses were in those fields. Strangely, I found this Pulitzer Prize-winning book hard to take. I am so used to reading theorems and proofs in the form of a technical paper that I found metaphors tedious. Why not state facts in the plain and concise language of mathematics, instead of using characters and stories?

The discussions on artificial intelligence seem rather dated. The sad fact is, the whole field of AI has made very little progress in terms of algorithm design; whatever advances we have seen in the last few decades are a result of improvements in hardware. The concept of a Turing Test, which once seemed so reasonable to me, now appears so inadequate. In fact, what is the point, even, of building machines that imitate humans? What kind of humans do we try to imitate?

It turned out that my mistake was in making the assumption that Hofstadter was a computer scientist. But he's not. His interest has always been in cognitive science. Coming from that angle, one does not look at the biological or mechanical functioning of the brain, or attempt to create algorithms to imitate human thinking patterns. One studies how humans think purely in a theoretical way. No wonder nothing comes out of it -- the whole point about being human is that each one of us is utterly impossible to predict!