Tag: Douglas Hofstadter
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Turing versus Rosenberg
Perhaps this would be better on my book review site, but it’s really a question of science, prompted by reading the challenging The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions. My issue with the book is not atheism but the essential claim of the author – Alex Rosenberg – that human beings cannot reason…
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Gödel, Escher, Bach
Eternal is the right word. Finally finished Godel, Escher, Bach – click the link above to read my review.
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A (partial) answer to my Goedelian conundrum?
Last week I puzzled over what seemed to me to be the hand waiving dismissal, by both Alan Turing and Douglas Hofstadter of what I saw as the problem of humans being able to write true statements that the formal systems employed by computers could not determine – the problem thrown up by Goedel’s Incompleteness…
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Turing, Hofstadter, Bach – with some Cherla thrown in
A few weeks ago I attended the morning (I had to go back to work in the afternoon) of the BCS doctoral consortium in Covent Garden in London – watching various PhD students present their work to audience of peers. The presentation which most interested me was that of Srikanth Cherla who is researching connectionist…
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Some notes on Hofstadter’s Typographical Number Theory
In Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, Douglas Hofstadter outlines his axiomatic “Typographical Number Theory” and sets certain problems for the reader – one is to show that b (a variable) is a power of 2. These are my notes in trying to demonstrate this (hopefully understandable to anyone who knows a bit of…
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How I discovered the fundamental theorem of arithmetic by chance
Actually, of course, I rediscovered it. I have been attempting to read, for the third time Douglas Hofstadter‘s celebrated Godel, Escher, Bach: I bought a copy in Washington DC in 2009 and loved it (though didn’t get very far before I put it down for some reason) but I have always struggled to get deeply…
cartesian product ... stuff about computing mostly 