| Search | About | Preferences | Interact | Help | |
| 150 million books. 1 search engine. | ||
Douglas R Hofstadter (Hofstadter, Douglas R.)
new books, used books, rare books by Douglas R Hofstadter
› Find all books by 'Douglas R Hofstadter' and compare prices› Find signed collectible books by 'Douglas R Hofstadter'
-
Are Quanta Real?: A Galilean DialogueISBN 025320545X (0-253-20545-X)
Softcover, Indiana Univ Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Are Quanta Real?: A Galilean Dialogue'Book summary:"... thought-provoking and delightful. I believe that anyone interested in nature's deepest secrets would find great stimulation in this charmingly written little gem of a book." Douglas Hofstadter
"... unusual, delightful, nonmathematical book... The reader is left in enjoyment and admiration." Scientific American
"This is a wonderful book... " American Journal of Physics
"... this imaginative work... elucidates the contrast between the classical, deterministic notions that seem inbred and the strange behavior of the microscopic quantum world.... by resurrecting Galileo's three questing friends, Jauch is able to pose questions a student would like to ask but too often is inhibited from doing so." The Key Reporter
An authority on both quantum mechanics and the work of Galileo, J. M. Jauch wrote this charming discourse in imitation of Galileo's celebrated dialogue "Two Major Systems of the World." The dialogue form is amusing as well as rewarding and appeals to the student of quantum mechanics, the philosopher or historian of science, and the lay person.
[via]More editions of Are Quanta Real?: A Galilean Dialogue:
-
Eugene OneginISBN 0465020941 (0-465-02094-1)
Softcover, Perseus Books Group
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Eugene Onegin'Book summary:The supreme poet of the Russian language, Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin has had a checkered existence in English. His prose, to be sure, has presented his translators with a less formidable set of hurdles. But Pushkin composed his masterpiece, Eugene Onegin, in a 14-line stanza of his own invention, with a slippery rhyme scheme and treacherously foursquare meter (i.e., iambic tetrameter, which tends to sound slightly singsong to English speakers). This has forced most of his translators--from Walter Arndt to James Falen to Charles Johnston--to shortchange form in favor of content. Vladimir Nabokov probably pushed this tendency as far as it could go, transforming Pushkin's poetry into perversely lumpy paragraphs (and enveloping the slim pickings of his translation in a jumbo-sized commentary). But nobody has managed to produce even a halfway-definitive version of Eugene Onegin.
Now Douglas Hofstadter, who's best known for Gödel, Escher, Bach, has taken a shot at it. Certainly he's no stranger to translation theory--his 1997 book, Le Ton Beau de Marot, was a brilliant and unbuttoned meditation on the translator's art, with numerous detours into the hinterlands of cognitive science. Theory and practice are two different matters, however, as Hofstadter is quick to admit: "The thought seemed quite ridiculous: me, with such sparse knowledge of Russian, hoping to clamber up this formidable Everest of translation, a book often said to be next to untranslatable, and square at the center of the inner circle of Russian literature!" Clamber he did, however--and the result is a charming if uneven version of the poem, more beholden to Cole Porter and Ogden Nash than the poet's 19th-century peers. Several of Hofstadter's slangier couplets might have Nabokov spinning in his grave: "Did thus our party boy exhaust / Himself at games, at zero cost?" Still, he manages some of Pushkin's loop-the-loops very nicely:
The air grew warm as days went flying,
Clearly Hofstadter's take on the poem goes heavy on the sizzle and fails to capture much of Pushkin's elegant gravity. Still, it's a welcome addition to the ranks, a handsome present to the poet on the occasion of his 200th birthday--and, rather winningly, a linguistic labor of love. --William Davies [via]
And winter knew to call it quits.
Eugene gave up his versifying,
But not the ghost, and not his wits.
He's lent new life by buds aborning,
And first thing on some clear spring morning
He leaves his cloistered, small château
Where, marmot-like, he'd braved the snow.
Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies : Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of ThoughtISBN 0140258353 (0-14-025835-3)
Softcover, Penguin Books, Limited
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies : Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought'More editions of Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies : Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought:
-
Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden BraidISBN 0140055797 (0-14-005579-7)
Softcover, Northwestern University Press
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid'Book summary:Twenty years after it topped the bestseller charts, Douglas R. 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. Allusions to Bach's music (centering on his Musical Offering) and Escher's continually paradoxical artwork are plentiful here. This more approachable material lets the author delve into serious number theory (concentrating on the ramifications of Gödel's Theorem of Incompleteness) while stopping along the way to ponder the work of a host of other mathematicians, artists, and thinkers.
The world has moved on since 1979, of course. The book predicted that computers probably won't ever beat humans in chess, though Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov in 1997. And the vinyl record, which serves for some of Hofstadter's best analogies, is now left to collectors. Sections on recursion and the graphs of certain functions from physics look tantalizing, like the fractals of recent chaos theory. And AI has moved on, of course, with mixed results. Yet Gödel, Escher, Bach remains a remarkable achievement. Its intellectual range and ability to let us visualize difficult mathematical concepts help make it one of this century's best for anyone who's interested in computers and their potential for real intelligence. --Richard Dragan
Topics Covered: J.S. Bach, M.C. Escher, Kurt Gödel: biographical information and work, artificial intelligence (AI) history and theories, strange loops and tangled hierarchies, formal and informal systems, number theory, form in mathematics, figure and ground, consistency, completeness, Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry, recursive structures, theories of meaning, propositional calculus, typographical number theory, Zen and mathematics, levels of description and computers; theory of mind: neurons, minds and thoughts; undecidability; self-reference and self-representation; Turing test for machine intelligence. [via]
More editions of Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid:
- Godel, Escher, Bach : An Eternal Golden Braid: ISBN 0140289208 (0-14-028920-8)
Softcover, Penguin Books, Limited - Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid: ISBN 0465026567 (0-465-02656-7)
Softcover, Basic Books - Godel, Escher, Bach : An Eternal Golden Braid: ISBN 0140179976 (0-14-017997-6)
Softcover, Penguin Books, Limited - Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid: ISBN 0394745027 (0-394-74502-7)
Softcover, Vintage Books - Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid: ISBN 0394756827 (0-394-75682-7)
Softcover, Knopf Publishing Group - Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid: ISBN 0465026850 (0-465-02685-0)
Hardcover, Perseus Books Group - Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid: ISBN 0140055797 (0-14-005579-7)
Softcover, Northwestern University Press
- Godel, Escher, Bach : An Eternal Golden Braid: ISBN 0140289208 (0-14-028920-8)
Grandeur and Illusion: French Literature and Society, 1600-1715ISBN 0465026974 (0-465-02697-4)
Hardcover, Basic Books
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Grandeur and Illusion: French Literature and Society, 1600-1715'More editions of Grandeur and Illusion: French Literature and Society, 1600-1715:
I Am a Strange LoopISBN 0465030793 (0-465-03079-3)
Softcover, Basic Books
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'I Am a Strange Loop'More editions of I Am a Strange Loop:
Inversions: A Catalog of Calligraphic CartwheelsISBN 0262610418 (0-262-61041-8)
Softcover, Mit Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Inversions: A Catalog of Calligraphic Cartwheels'More editions of Inversions: A Catalog of Calligraphic Cartwheels:
-
Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and PatternISBN 0465045405 (0-465-04540-5)
Hardcover, Perseus Books Group
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern'Book summary:An interlocked collection of literary, scientific, and artistic studies. [via]
More editions of Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern:
-
The Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and SoulISBN 0465030912 (0-465-03091-2)
Softcover, Perseus Books Group
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul'Book summary:Ever wondered who you are? Who you really are? This collection of writings and reflections by some of today's most notable thinkers is designed to enliven this most central, and most baffling, question in the philosophy of mind. In some ways, the questions posed and bantered about in this book are at the heart of all philosophical reasoning. They are the ultimate questions about the self. The Mind's I contains an astonishing variety of approaches to answering the question, "Who am I?" Between the covers of this book one encounters the literary erudition of Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges alongside the analytic rigor of John Searle. There are sophisticated metaphorical pieces (such as "The Princess Ineffabelle" by Polish philosopher and writer Stanislaw Lem), intriguing dialogues (like Raymond Smullyan's "Is God a Taoist?"), and serious but engaging philosophical essays from a host of thinkers (see Thomas Nagel's "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?").
Editors Hofstadter and Dennett--leading lights in the study of cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and the philosophy of mind--follow each selection with a short reflection designed to elaborate on their main themes. The Mind's I admirably broadens their fields to a more general audience. The book's essays are grouped into six categories, each successively raising the philosophical stakes by introducing new levels of complexity. Ultimately, one confronts some of the thorniest questions in modern philosophy here, such as the nature of free will, our place in the metaphysical world, and the possibility of genuine artificial intelligence. The book closes with a playful and perplexing piece by Robert Nozick, an adequate summation to The Mind's I. He writes, "Perhaps God has not decided yet whether he has created, in this world, a fictional world or a real one.... Which decision do you hope for?" --Eric de Place [via]
More editions of The Mind's I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul:
-
Mind's I : Fantasies and Reflections on Self and SoulISBN 014006253X (0-14-006253-X)
Softcover, Penguin Books, Limited
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Mind's I : Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul'More editions of Mind's I : Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul:
-
Virtual Music: Computer Synthesis of Musical StyleISBN 026203283X (0-262-03283-X)
Hardcover, Mit Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Virtual Music: Computer Synthesis of Musical Style'Book summary:Virtual Music is about artificial creativity. Focusing on the author's Experiments in Musical Intelligence computer music composing program, the author and a distinguished group of experts discuss many of the issues surrounding the program, including artificial intelligence, music cognition, and aesthetics.
The book is divided into four parts. The first part provides a historical background to Experiments in Musical Intelligence, including examples of historical antecedents, followed by an overview of the program by Douglas Hofstadter. The second part follows the composition of an Experiments in Musical Intelligence work, from the creation of a database to the completion of a new work in the style of Mozart. It includes, in sophisticated lay terms, relatively detailed explanations of how each step in the process contributes to the final composition. The third part consists of perspectives and analyses by Jonathan Berger, Daniel Dennett, Bernard Greenberg, Douglas R. Hofstadter, Steve Larson, and Eleanor Selfridge-Field. The fourth part presents the author's responses to these commentaries, as well as his thoughts on the implications of artificial creativity.
The book (and corresponding Web site) includes an appendix providing extended musical examples referred to and discussed in the book, including composers such as Scarlatti, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Puccini, Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, Debussy, Bartók, and others. It is also accompanied by a CD containing performances of the music in the text. [via]More editions of Virtual Music: Computer Synthesis of Musical Style:
![[powered by Muze Inc.]](http://i.bookfinder.com/images/site/muze/powered_by_muze.gif){kind=small}