Academic career Douglas Hofstadter

hofstadter giving presentation @ 2006 singularity summit

at university of michigan , indiana university, co-authored, melanie mitchell, computational model of high-level perception  – copycat – , several other models of analogy-making , cognition, including tabletop project, co-developed robert m. french. hofstadter s doctoral student james marshall subsequently extended copycat project under name metacat . letter spirit project, implemented gary mcgraw , john rehling, aims model act of artistic creativity designing stylistically uniform gridfonts (typefaces limited grid). other more recent models include phaeaco (implemented harry foundalis) , seqsee (abhijit mahabal), model high-level perception , analogy-making in microdomains of bongard problems , number sequences, respectively, george (francisco lara-dammer), models processes of perception , discovery in triangle geometry.

the pursuit of beauty has driven hofstadter both inside , outside professional work. seeks beautiful mathematical patterns, beautiful explanations, beautiful typefaces, beautiful sonic patterns in poetry, etc. hofstadter has said of himself, m has 1 foot in world of humanities , arts, , other foot in world of science. has had several exhibitions of artworks in various university art galleries. these shows have featured large collections of gridfonts, ambigrams (pieces of calligraphy created 2 readings, either of obtained other rotating or reflecting ambigram, oscillation , necker cube or rabbit/duck figure of joseph jastrow), , whirly art (music-inspired visual patterns realized using shapes based on various alphabets india). (hofstadter invented term ambigram in 1984; many ambigrammists on world have since taken concept.)

hofstadter collects , studies cognitive errors (largely, not solely, speech errors), bon mots (spontaneous humorous quips), , analogies of sorts, , long-time observation of these diverse products of cognition, , theories mechanisms underlie them, have exerted powerful influence on architectures of computational models developed himself , farg members.

all farg computational models share key principles, including:

that human thinking carried out thousands of independent small actions in parallel, biased concepts activated
that activation spreads activated concepts less activated neighbor concepts
that there mental temperature regulates degree of randomness in parallel activity
that promising avenues tend explored more rapidly unpromising ones

farg models have overarching philosophy cognition built making of analogies. computational architectures share these precepts called active symbols architectures.

hofstadter s thesis consciousness, first expressed in gödel, escher, bach (geb) present in several of later books, is emergent consequence of seething lower-level activity in brain. in geb draws analogy between social organization of colony of ants , mind seen coherent colony of neurons. in particular, hofstadter claims our sense of having (or being) comes abstract pattern terms strange loop , abstract cousin of such concrete phenomena audio , video feedback, , hofstadter has defined level-crossing feedback loop . prototypical example of abstract notion self-referential structure @ core of gödel s incompleteness theorems. hofstadter s 2007 book strange loop carries vision of consciousness considerably further, including idea each human distributed on numerous brains, rather being limited precisely 1 brain.

hofstadter s writing characterized intense interaction between form , content, exemplified 20 dialogues in geb, many of simultaneously talk , imitate strict musical forms used bach, such canons , fugues. of hofstadter s books feature kind of structural alternation: in geb between dialogues , chapters, in mind s between selections , reflections, in metamagical themas between chapters , postscripts, , forth. both in writing , in teaching, hofstadter stresses concrete, using examples , analogies, , avoids abstract. typical of courses teaches seminar group theory , galois theory visualized , in abstract mathematical ideas rendered concretely possible. puts great effort making ideas clear , visual, , asserts when teaches, if students not understand something, never fault own.

hofstadter passionate languages. in addition english, mother tongue, speaks french , italian fluently (the language spoken @ home children italian). @ various times in life, has studied (in descending order of level of fluency reached) german, russian, spanish, swedish, mandarin, dutch, polish, , hindi. love of sounds pushes him strive minimize, , ideally rid of, foreign accent.

le ton beau de marot: in praise of music of language long book devoted language , translation, poetry translation, , 1 of leitmotifs set of 88 translations of ma mignonne , highly constrained poem 16th-century french poet clément marot. in book, hofstadter jokingly describes himself pilingual (meaning sum total of varying degrees of mastery of languages s studied comes 3.14159 ...), oligoglot (someone speaks few languages).

in 1999, bicentennial year of russian poet , writer alexander pushkin, hofstadter published verse translation of pushkin s classic novel-in-verse eugene onegin. hofstadter has translated many other poems (always respecting formal constraints), , 2 novels (in prose): la chamade (that mad ache) french writer françoise sagan, , la scoperta dell alba (the discovery of dawn) walter veltroni, head of partito democratico in italy. discovery of dawn published in 2007, , mad ache published in 2009, bound hofstadter s essay translator, trader: essay on pleasantly pervasive paradoxes of translation.

hofstadter s law

hofstadter s law states takes longer expect, when take account hofstadter s law. law outlined in work gödel, escher, bach: eternal golden braid.

students

hofstadter s former ph.d. students include (with dissertation title):

don byrd—music notation computer
david chalmers—toward theory of consciousness
gray a. clossman—a model of categorization , learning in connectionist broadcast system
hamid ekbia—ai dreams , discourse: science , engineering in tension
harry foundalis—phaeaco: cognitive architecture inspired bongard s problems
bob french—tabletop: emergent, stochastic model of analogy-making
francisco lara-dammer—modeling human discoverativity in geometry
abhijit mahabal—seqsee: concept-centered architecture sequence perception
jim marshall—metacat: self-watching cognitive architecture analogy-making , high level perception
gary mcgraw—letter spirit (part one): emergent high-level perception of letters using fluid concepts
marsha meredith—seek-whence: model of pattern perception
eric nichols—musicat: computer model of musical listening , analogy-making
melanie mitchell—copycat: computer model of high-level perception , conceptual slippage in analogy-making
john rehling—letter spirit (part two): modeling creativity in visual domain
wang pei (pei wang)—non-axiomatic reasoning system: exploring essence of intelligence
william york—aesthetics , scope , limits of cognitive science




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