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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Exciting, illuminating, but not for GEB fans, 5 Aug 1999
By A Customer
This is a book that does what it says on the tin, especially the subtitle about exploring fundamental mechanisms of thought. A strong movement in cognitive science is exploring how the understanding and use of metaphor is not just a rhetorical flourish to liven up poetry and prose but central to how we live in the physical world. Hofstadter and the FARG are major players in this movement. The book describes AI systems developed by the FARG over the past 15+ years that involve new memory and conceptual structures and use stochastic algorithms to reason by analogy. However it is a technical text, you will learn much about the work and the technical issues involved, but if you are seeking the rush of excitement at being exposed to exciting big ideas and new possibilities that a generation of neo-hippy computer scientists felt reading Godel, Escher Bach, and Metamagical Themas, you will be disappointed. The Hofstadter masterplan is present, and the ideas are still big and exciting, but the sad fact of doing science, that the details can be hard and complex to an untrained audience, is confronted here. This is a valuable book, but hard work for the non-specialist.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Dry and almost totally unilluminating, 22 Feb 1999
By A Customer
Those who enjoyed Hofstadter's collection of essays, "Metamagical Themas", particularly those dealing with the mechanics of analogising, are likely to be disappointed by this book. Had he and his artificial intelligence team made a breakthrough comprehensible to lay people like me, it would have been broadcast on page 1. The book is basically a synopsis of how the team's anagram and number sequence programs were engineered, and the detail is remorseless. In terms of addressing how the mind works, the explanatory power of this work is practically negligible. When the artificial intelligence community can guess at how, mechanically, an individual forms aesthetic judgments or comprehends jokes, they might start to hold people's attention. A laborious account of how computers mimic the cerebration of a typical "Countdown" contestant is, in my opinion, calculated to lose the interest of non-AI specialists very quickly indeed.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
One of my favourite books of all time, 23 Jan 2002
I agree with the previous reviewer in that there is a fair amount of detail in here; even so, there wasn't enough for me. I want to write some programs in the way described in this book. I found this book really thought-provoking, but more than that I just think that he and his group are heading in a very interesting direction and blackboard architecture and his parallel terraced scan and so on will suface again and again wherever AI goes.
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by Malcolm Gladwell
