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ShareTwenty years after it topped the bestseller charts, Douglas R.
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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.
For more information about the title Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, read the full description at Amazon.com, or see the following related books:
I Am a Strange Loop — Douglas Hofstadter's long-awaited return to the themes of Gödel, Escher, Bach--an original and controversial view of the nature of ... > read more
On Intelligence — Jeff Hawkins, the high-tech success story behind PalmPilots and the Redwood Neuroscience Institute, does a lot of thinking about thinking. In On ... > read more
The Broken Fountain: Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition (Columbia Classics in Anthropology) (Columbia Classics in Anthropology) — As Ida Susser writes in reference to Belmonte's Broken Fountain, "good ethnographies have long lives." This classic of urban anthropology, one of ... > read more
The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence — How much do we humans enjoy our current status as the most intelligent beings on earth? Enough to try to stop our own inventions from surpassing us ... > read moreRecommend this page on Facebook, Twitter,
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