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Douglas R. Hofstadter

Born February 15, 1945 (1945-02-15) (age 63)
New York, New York
Occupation Professor of cognitive science
Nationality United States
Writing period 1979-Present
Subjects Cognitive science, philosophy of mind, translation, analogy-making

Douglas Richard Hofstadter (born February 15, 1945 in New York, New York) is an American academic whose research focuses on the nature of thinking, consciousness, and creativity. Events 590 - Khosrau II is crowned as king of Persia 1637 - Ferdinand III becomes Holy Roman Emperor Year 1945 ( MCMXLV) was a Common year starting on Monday (link will display the full calendar The City of New York Employment is a Contract between two parties, one being the employer and the other being the employee. The meaning of the word professor ( Latin: professor, person who professes to be an expert in some art or science teacher of highest rank) varies Cognitive science may be broadly defined as the multidisciplinary study of mind and behavior Nationality is a relationship between a Person and their State of Origin, Culture, association Affiliation and/or Loyalty The United States of America —commonly referred to as the Year 1979 ( MCMLXXIX) was a Common year starting on Monday (link displays the 1979 Gregorian calendar) Cognitive science may be broadly defined as the multidisciplinary study of mind and behavior Philosophy of mind is the branch of Philosophy that studies the nature of the Mind, Mental events Mental functions mental properties Translation is the interpreting of the meaning of a text and the subsequent production of an equivalent text likewise called a " translation Analogy is both the cognitive process of transferring Information from a particular subject (the analogue or source to another particular subject (the target and Events 590 - Khosrau II is crowned as king of Persia 1637 - Ferdinand III becomes Holy Roman Emperor Year 1945 ( MCMXLV) was a Common year starting on Monday (link will display the full calendar The City of New York The United States of America —commonly referred to as the He is best known for his book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid (abbreviated as GEB) which was published in 1979, and which won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction. Gödel Escher Bach an Eternal Golden Braid (commonly GEB) is a Pulitzer Prize -winning book by Douglas Hofstadter, described The Pulitzer Prize, ˈpʊlɨtsɚ PULL-it-sər is an American award regarded as the highest national honor in Newspaper journalism,

Contents

Early life and education

Hofstadter is the son of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Robert Hofstadter. The Nobel Prize (Nobelpriset (Nobelprisen is a Swedish prize established in the 1895 will of Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel; it was first awarded in Peace, Literature Robert Hofstadter ( February 5, 1915 &ndash November 17, 1990) was the winner of the 1961 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his He grew up on the campus of Stanford University, where his father was a professor. Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly known as Stanford University or simply Stanford, is a private Research university located in The younger Hofstadter graduated with Distinction in Mathematics from Stanford in 1965 and received his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Oregon in 1975. Mathematics is the body of Knowledge and Academic discipline that studies such concepts as Quantity, Structure, Space and "PhD" redirects here for other uses see PhD (disambiguation. Physics (Greek Physis - φύσις in everyday terms is the Science of Matter and its motion. The University of Oregon (UO is a public, Coeducational Research university in Eugene Oregon, United States.

Academic career

Hofstadter is College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science at Indiana University Bloomington, where he directs the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition which consists of himself and his graduate students, forming the "Fluid Analogies Research Group" (FARG). Indiana University is the flagship campus of the Indiana University system. He was initially appointed to the Indiana University's Computer Science Department faculty in 1977, and at that time he launched his research program in computer modeling of mental processes (which at that time he called "artificial intelligence research", a label that he has since dropped in favor of "cognitive science research"). In 1984, he moved to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he was hired as a professor of psychology and was also appointed to the Walgreen Chair for the Study of Human Understanding. The University of Michigan Ann Arbor ( U of M, U-M, UM or simply Michigan) is a top-ranked Coeducational public research In 1988 he returned to Bloomington as "College of Arts and Sciences Professor" in both Cognitive Science and Computer Science, and also was appointed Adjunct Professor of History and Philosophy of Science, Philosophy, Comparative Literature, and Psychology, but he states that his involvement with most of these departments is nominal. [1][2][3]

Hofstadter's many interests include music, visual art, the mind, creativity, consciousness, self-reference, translation and mathematics. MIND ( Moving In New Directions) (est 1975 is an alternative education high school in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Creativity is a mental process involving the generation of new Ideas or Concepts, or new associations of the creative mind between existing ideas or concepts Consciousness has been defined loosely as a constellation of attributes of Mind such as Subjectivity, Self-awareness, Sentience, and the Self-reference is a phenomenon in natural or Formal languages consisting of a sentence or Formula referring to itself directly or Translation is the interpreting of the meaning of a text and the subsequent production of an equivalent text likewise called a " translation Mathematics is the body of Knowledge and Academic discipline that studies such concepts as Quantity, Structure, Space and He has numerous recursive sequences and geometric constructions named after him. [4][5][6]

At the University of Michigan and Indiana University, he co-authored, with Melanie Mitchell, a computational model of "high-level perception" — Copycat — and several other models of analogy-making and cognition. Melanie Mitchell is a professor of computer science at Portland State University. Copycat is a model of analogy making and human Cognition based on the concept of the Parallel terraced scan, developed by Douglas Hofstadter Analogy is both the cognitive process of transferring Information from a particular subject (the analogue or source to another particular subject (the target and Cognition is a concept used in different ways by different disciplines but is generally accepted to mean the process of awareness or thought The Copycat project was subsequently extended under the name "Metacat" by Hofstadter's doctoral student James Marshall. [7] The Letter Spirit project, implemented by Gary McGraw and John Rehling, aims to model the act of artistic creativity by designing stylistically uniform "gridfonts" (typefaces limited to a grid). Other more recent models are Phaeaco (implemented by Harry Foundalis) and SeqSee (Abhijit Mahabal), which model high-level perception and analogy-making in the microdomains of Bongard problems and number sequences, respectively. A Bongard problem is a kind of puzzle invented by the Soviet Computer scientist Mikhail Moiseevich Bongard, probably in the mid-1960s [8][9]

Hofstadter collects and studies cognitive errors (largely but not solely speech errors), "bon mots" (spontaneous humorous quips), and analogies of all sorts, and his long-time observation of these diverse products of cognition, and his theories about the mechanisms that underlie them, have exerted a powerful influence on the architectures of the computational models developed by himself and FARG members. [10]

All FARG computational models share certain key principles, among which are: that human thinking is carried out by thousands of independent small actions in parallel, biased by the concepts that are currently activated; that activation spreads from activated concepts to less activated "neighbor concepts"; that there is a "mental temperature" that regulates the degree of randomness in the parallel activity; that promising avenues tend to be explored more rapidly than unpromising ones. FARG models also have an overarching philosophy that all cognition is built from the making of analogies. The computational architectures that share these precepts are called "active symbols" architectures.

Provoked by predictions of a technological singularity (the hypothetical moment at which artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence), Hofstadter has both organized and participated in several public discussions of the topic. The technological singularity is a theoretical future point of unprecedented technological progress caused in part by the ability of machines to improve themselves using Artificial At Indiana University in 1999 he organized such a symposium, and in April of 2000, he organized a larger symposium entitled "Spiritual Robots" at Stanford University, in which he moderated a panel consisting of Ray Kurzweil, Hans Moravec, Kevin Kelly, Ralph Merkle, Bill Joy, Frank Drake, John Holland, John Koza. Raymond Kurzweil (kɚzwaɪl (born February 12 1948 is an inventor and Futurist. Hans Moravec (born November 30 1948 in Austria) is a research Professor at the Robotics Institute (Carnegie Mellon of Carnegie Kevin Kelly may refer to Kevin Kelly (editor, founding executive director of Wired magazine Kevin Kelly (politician, an American Ralph C Merkle (born February 2, 1952) is a pioneer in Public key cryptography, and more recently a researcher and speaker on Molecular nanotechnology William Nelson Joy (born Nov 8, 1954) commonly known as Bill Joy, is an American Computer scientist. Dr Frank Donald Drake (born May 28 1930, Chicago) is an American Astronomer and Astrophysicist. John Holland is the name of several notable persons in history John L John R Koza is a Computer scientist and a consulting professor at Stanford University, most notable for his work in pioneering the use of Genetic programming Hofstadter was also an invited panelist at the first "Singularity Summit," held at Stanford in May 2006. Hofstadter expressed doubt about the likelihood of the singularity coming to pass in the foreseeable future. [11][12][13][14][15][16]

Hofstadter's thesis about consciousness, first expressed in GEB but also present in several of his later books, is that it is an emergent consequence of seething lower-level activity in the brain. In GEB he draws an analogy between the social organization of a colony of ants and the mind seen as a coherent "colony" of neurons. In particular, Hofstadter claims that our sense of having (or being) an "I" comes from the abstract pattern he terms a "strange loop", which is an abstract cousin of such concrete phenomena as audio and video feedback, and which Hofstadter has defined as "a level-crossing feedback loop". Audio Feedback (also known as the Larsen effect after the Danish scientist Søren Larsen who first discovered its principles is a special kind of Feedback Optical feedback is the optical equivalent of Acoustic feedback. The prototypical example of this abstract notion is the self-referential structure at the core of Gödel's incompleteness theorems. In Mathematical logic, Gödel's incompleteness theorems, proved by Kurt Gödel in 1931 are two Theorems stating inherent limitations of all but the most Hofstadter's 2007 book I Am a Strange Loop carries his vision of consciousness considerably further, including the idea that each human "I" is distributed over numerous brains, rather than being limited to precisely one brain. [17]

Public image

Hofstadter has said that he feels "uncomfortable with the nerd culture that centers on computers. " He admits that "a large fraction [of his audience] seems to be those who are fascinated by technology," but when it was suggested that his work "has inspired many students to begin careers in computing and artificial intelligence" he replied that he has "no interest in computers. "[18][19] In that interview he also mentioned a course he has twice given at Indiana University, in which he took a "skeptical look at a number of highly-touted AI projects and overall approaches". [3] For example, upon the defeat of Kasparov by Deep Blue, he commented that "It was a watershed event, but it doesn't have to do with computers becoming intelligent. Garry Kasparov (Га́рри Ки́мович Каспа́ров) (born as Garry Kimovich Weinstein on April 13 1963 in Baku, Azerbaijan SSR, Soviet Deep Blue is a Chess - playing Computer developed by IBM. On 11 May 1997, the machine won a six-game match by two wins to "[20]

In 1988 Dutch director Piet Hoenderdos created a docudrama about Hofstadter and his ideas entitled "Victim of the Brain" based on The Mind's I. This page is about the book for the Album by Dark Tranquillity, see The Mind's I (album If you want to see the Star Wars novel It includes interviews with Hofstadter about his work. [21] In 2010: Odyssey Two, Arthur C. Clarke's first sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey, HAL 9000 is caught in a "Hofstadter-Moebius loop". 2010 Odyssey Two is a best-selling Science fiction novel by Arthur C Sir Arthur Charles Clarke, CBE (16 December 1917–19 March 2008 was a British Science fiction Author, Inventor, and For other uses see 2001 A Space Odyssey. 2001 A Space Odyssey ( 1968) is a Science fiction Novel HAL 9000 ( Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic Computer is a fictional Computer in Arthur C August Ferdinand Möbius ( November 17, 1790 &ndash September 26, 1868, (ˈmøbiʊs was a German Mathematician and Hofstadter's book Fluid Concepts & Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought was the first book sold by Amazon.com. Amazoncom Inc ( is an American electronic commerce ( E-commerce) company in Seattle Washington. [22]

Columnist

When Martin Gardner retired from writing his "Mathematical Games" column for Scientific American magazine, Hofstadter succeeded him in 1981-1983 with a column entitled Metamagical Themas (an anagram of "Mathematical Games"). Martin Gardner (b October 21, 1914, Tulsa Oklahoma) is a popular American mathematics and science writer specializing in Recreational mathematics This article is about using Mathematics to study the inner-workings of Multiplayer games which on the surface may not appear mathematical at all Scientific American is a Popular science magazine, published (first weekly and later monthly since August 28, 1845, making it Metamagical Themas is an eclectic collection of articles written for Scientific American during the early 1980s by Douglas Hofstadter, and published An idea he introduced in one of these columns was the concept of "Reviews of This Book", a book containing nothing but cross-referenced reviews of itself which has an online implementation. [23] One of Hofstadter's columns in Scientific American concerned the damaging effects of sexist language, and two chapters of his book Metamagical Themas are devoted to that topic, one of which is a biting analogy-based satire entitled "A Person Paper on Purity in Language", in which the reader's presumed revulsion at racism and racist language is used as a lever to motivate an analogous revulsion to sexism and sexist language. Metamagical Themas is an eclectic collection of articles written for Scientific American during the early 1980s by Douglas Hofstadter, and published [24]

Personal

Hofstadter was married to Carol Ann Brush. They met in Bloomington, and married in Ann Arbor in 1985. They had two children, Danny and Monica, but Carol died in 1993 from the sudden onset of a brain tumor — glioblastoma multiforme — when their children were five and two. Glioblastoma multiforme ( GBM) is the most common and most aggressive type of primary Brain Tumor, accounting for 52% of all primary brain tumor The Carol Ann Brush Hofstadter Memorial Scholarship for Bologna-bound IU students was established in 1996 in her name. [25] Hofstadter's book "Le Ton beau de Marot" is dedicated to their two children and its dedication reads "To M. & D. , living sparks of their Mommy's soul".

Both inside and outside his professional work, Hofstadter is driven by a pursuit of beauty. He seeks beautiful mathematical patterns, beautiful explanations, beautiful typefaces, beautiful sonic patterns in poetry, and so forth. Hofstadter has said of himself, "I'm someone who has one foot in the world of humanities and arts, and the other foot in the world of science. " He has had several exhibitions of his artworks in various university art galleries. These shows have featured large collections of his gridfonts, his ambigrams (pieces of calligraphy created with two readings, either of which is usually obtained from the other by rotating or reflecting the ambigram, but sometimes simply by "oscillation", like the Necker Cube or the rabbit/duck figure of Joseph Jastrow), and his "Whirly Art" (music-inspired visual patterns realized using shapes based on various alphabets from India). An ambigram, also sometimes known as an inversion or flipscript, is a graphical figure that spells out a word not only in its form as presented but also in another The Necker Cube is an Optical illusion first published in 1832 by Swiss Crystallographer Louis Albert Necker. Joseph Jastrow ( January 30, 1863 &ndash January 8, 1944) was an American Psychologist, born in Warsaw Poland (The term "ambigram" was invented by Hofstadter in 1984 and has since been taken up by many ambigrammists all over the world. )[26]

Hofstadter has composed numerous pieces for piano, and a few for piano and voice. He created an audio CD with the title DRH/JJ, which includes all these compositions performed primarily by pianist Jane Jackson, but with a few performed by Brian Jones, Dafna Barenboim, Gitanjali Mathur and himself. [27]

Hofstadter's writing is characterized by an intense interaction between form and content, as is exemplified by the 20 dialogues in GEB, many of which simultaneously talk about and imitate strict musical forms used by Bach, such as canons and fugues. Most of Hofstadter's books are characterized by some kind of structural alternation in GEB between dialogues and chapters, in The Mind's I between selections and reflections, in Metamagical Themas between Chapters and Postscripts, and so forth. Both in his writing and in his teaching, Hofstadter stresses the concrete, constantly using examples and analogies, and avoids the abstract. Typical of the courses he teaches is his seminar "Group Theory and Galois Theory Visualized", in which abstract mathematical ideas are rendered as concrete as possible. He puts great effort into making ideas clear and visual, and asserts that when he teaches, if his students do not understand something, it is never their fault but always his own.

Hofstadter is passionate about languages. He has studied many of them, and speaks them to varying degrees. In addition to English, his mother tongue, he speaks French and Italian fluently (the language spoken at home with his children is Italian). At various times in his life, he has studied (in descending order of level of fluency reached) German, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Mandarin, Dutch, Polish, and Hindi. His love of sounds pushes him to strive to minimize, and ideally get rid of, any foreign accent.

Le Ton beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language is a long book devoted to language and translation, especially poetry translation, and one of its leitmotifs is a set of some 88 translations of "Ma Mignonne", a highly constrained poem by sixteenth-century French poet Clément Marot. Clément Marot (23 November 1496 – 12 September 1544 was a French Poet of the Renaissance period In this book, Hofstadter jokingly describes himself as "pilingual" (meaning that the sum total of the varying degrees of mastery of all the languages that he's studied comes to 3. 14159. . . ), as well as an "oligoglot" (someone who speaks "a few" languages). [28][29]

In 1999, the bicentennial year of Russian poet and writer Alexander Pushkin, Hofstadter published a verse translation of Pushkin's classic novel-in-verse Eugene Onegin. Eugene Onegin ( Russian: Евгений Онегин BGN/PCGN: Yevgeniy Onegin) is a Novel in verse written by Aleksandr Pushkin It is highly constrained and filled with many types of sonic pattern. Aside from Eugene Onegin, Hofstadter has translated many other poems (always respecting their formal constraints), and two other novels (in prose): La Chamade (That Mad Ache) by French writer Françoise Sagan, and La Scoperta dell'Alba (The Discovery of Dawn) by Walter Veltroni, the Mayor of Rome and head of the Partito Democratico in Italy. Eugene Onegin ( Russian: Евгений Онегин BGN/PCGN: Yevgeniy Onegin) is a Novel in verse written by Aleksandr Pushkin Françoise Sagan ( June 21, 1935 &ndash September 24 2004) real name Françoise Quoirez, was a French playwright Walter Veltroni (born July 3, 1955) is an Italian Writer, Journalist and Politician, leader of the Democratic Both of these translated novels are slated for imminent publication.

Hofstadter is related by marriage to the evolutionary theorist Stephen Jay Gould: Hofstadter's paternal aunt was married to Gould's maternal uncle. Stephen Jay Gould (September 10 1941 &ndash May 20 2002 was a prominent American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science Hofstadter is a vegetarian. [30]

The dedication for I Am A Strange Loop is: "To my sister Laura, who can understand, and to our sister Molly, who cannot. " Hofstadter explains in the Preface that his younger sister Molly never developed the ability to speak or understand language.

Published works

Books

The books published by Hofstadter are (the ISBNs refer to paperback editions, where available):

Papers

Hofstadter wrote, among many others, the following papers:

Involvement in other books

Hofstadter wrote forewords for or edited the following books:

Students

Some of Hofstadter's former students include:

See also

Notes

  1. ^ IU pages as faculty, IU distinguished faculty (see this announcement on March 21, 2007) and as speaker
  2. ^ A Day in the Life of... Douglas Hofstadter 2004
  3. ^ a b Seminar: AI: Hope and Hype 1999
  4. ^ Douglas Hofstadter's sequences Java applet 2002
  5. ^ Hofstadter items at the On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences: Q-sequence, Hofstadter-Conway $10000 sequence, G-sequence, H-sequence, type, Anoher type, Reg Allenby, K. Pinn : A chaotic cousin of Conway's recursive sequence, S. M. Tanny : A well-behaved cousin of the Hofstadter sequence, Hofstadter-type sequence
  6. ^ Hofstadter items at Wolfram MathWorld: Hofstadter-Conway $10,000 Sequence, G-Sequence, H-Sequence, Q-Sequence, Male-Female Sequences, Figure-Figure Sequence and geometric constructs: Hofstadter Point, Hofstadter Triangle, Hofstadter Ellipse
  7. ^ An overview of Metacat 2003
  8. ^ By Analogy: A talk with the most remarkable researcher in artificial intelligence today, Douglas Hofstadter, the author of Gödel, Escher, Bach Wired Magazine, November 1995
  9. ^ Analogy as the Core of Cognition Review of Stanford lecture, Feb 2, 2006
  10. ^ Hofstadter, Douglas, To Err is Human; to Study Error-making is Cognitive Science. David John Chalmers (born April 20, 1966) is a Philosopher in the area of Philosophy of mind. Melanie Mitchell is a professor of computer science at Portland State University. Copycat is a model of analogy making and human Cognition based on the concept of the Parallel terraced scan, developed by Douglas Hofstadter Scott A Jones (born in 1960 is an American Inventor and Serial entrepreneur. Harry Foundalis (Χάρης Φουνταλής born April 14th 1962 in Edessa, Greece) is a cognitive scientist A Bongard problem is a kind of puzzle invented by the Soviet Computer scientist Mikhail Moiseevich Bongard, probably in the mid-1960s In the platonia dilemma introduced in Douglas Hofstadter 's book Metamagical Themas, an eccentric trillionaire gathers 20 people together and tells Egbert B Gebstadter is a fictional author who appears in the indexes (and sometimes in the text of books by Douglas R BLooP and FLooP are simple Programming languages designed by Douglas Hofstadter to illustrate a point in his book Gödel Escher Bach Hofstadter's Law is a self-referencing time-related adage coined by Douglas Hofstadter and named by himself Together with David Moser. Michigan Quarterly Review, Vol. XXVIII, No. 2, 1989, pp. 185-215.
  11. ^ Will Spiritual Robots Replace Humanity By 2100? April 1, 2000 Note: as of 2007, videos seem to be missing.
  12. ^ “Moore’s Law, Artificial Evolution, and the Fate of Humanity. ” In L. Booker, S. Forrest, et al. (eds. ), Perspectives on Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
  13. ^ The Singularity Summit at Stanford 2006
  14. ^ Trying to Muse Rationally about the Singularity Scenario 35 minute video, May 13, 2006
  15. ^ Quotes from his 2006 Singularity Summit presentation
  16. ^ “Staring EMI Straight in the Eye — and Doing My Best Not to Flinch. ” In David Cope, Virtual Music: Computer Synthesis of Musical Style, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
  17. ^ Consciousness In The Cosmos: Perspective of Mind: Douglas Hofstadter
  18. ^ Me, My Soul, and I. Wired (March 2007). Retrieved on 2007-12-10. Year 2007 ( MMVII) was a Common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar in the 21st century. Events 1041 - Empress Zoe of Byzantium elevates her adoptive son to the throne of the Eastern Roman Empire as Michael V
  19. ^ The Mind Reader New York Times Magazine, April 1, 2007
  20. ^ Mean Chess-Playing Computer Tears at Meaning of Thought by Bruce Weber, February 19, 1996, New York Times
  21. ^ Victim of the Brain - 1988 docudrama about the ideas of Douglas Hofstadter
  22. ^ Amazon. com's company timeline July 1995
  23. ^ Online implementation of his Reviews of this Book idea
  24. ^ A Person Paper on Purity in Language by William Satire (alias Douglas R. Hofstadter), 1985 - a satirical piece, on the subject of sexist language
  25. ^ French and Italian Spring 1996, Vol. X
  26. ^ Sounds like Bach
  27. ^ Piano Music by Douglas Hofstadter (Audio CD) ISBN 1576771431, 2000
  28. ^ Hofstadter, Douglas R. Le Ton Beau de Marot. New York: Basic Books, 1997, pp. 16-17.
  29. ^ Hofstadter, Douglas R. Le Ton Beau de Marot. New York: Basic Books, 1997, p. 627
  30. ^ Gardner, Martin (august 2007). Martin Gardner (b October 21, 1914, Tulsa Oklahoma) is a popular American mathematics and science writer specializing in Recreational mathematics "Do Loops Explain Consciousness? Review of I Am a Strange Loop" (pdf). Notices of the American Mathematical Society (7): 853.  
  31. ^ CRCC Publications offline

External links


Persondata
NAME Hofstadter, Douglas Richard
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hofstadter, Douglas
SHORT DESCRIPTION American academic and author
DATE OF BIRTH February 15, 1945
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City, New York
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH
Events 590 - Khosrau II is crowned as king of Persia 1637 - Ferdinand III becomes Holy Roman Emperor Year 1945 ( MCMXLV) was a Common year starting on Monday (link will display the full calendar
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