8 ms·
Although not directly development related. The most impressive book I've had the pleasure of reading is "Gödel Escher Bach: An eternal golden braid" (also known
by JelteF 10y ago
Although not directly development related. The most impressive book I've had the pleasure of reading is "Gödel Escher Bach: An eternal golden braid" (also known as GEB) from Douglas Hofstadter.
It's hard to explain what it is about exactly, but it contains ideas and concepts from mathematics, computer science, philosophy and conscience. All of it is explained in very clear and interesting way. I can recommend it to anyone interested in these topics.
The book won a Pulitzer and to take a quote from the Scientific American about it: "Every few decades, an unknown author brings out a book of such depth, clarity, range, wit, beauty and originality that it is recognized at once as a major literary event."
- sAbakumoff 10y agowow, this book has the soaring rating on Amazon. I added to my "to read" list, 10x for suggestion
- guelo 10y agoI wouldn't bother, it is an incomprehensible mess, impossible to get through, pretentious, non rigurous sloppy thinking, and ultimately a disservice to Godels incompleteness theorem.
- orf 10y agoThat's a harsh critique, can you elaborate?
- guelo 10y agoRecursion, self reference, emergent properties are important topics and there are many good resources for studying them, GEB just isn't one of them. Most people that embark on the journey of reading the book fail and are unable to complete it. I believe the author tried to make the book itself some kind of self referential repeating work of art, which might be appealing to some but doesn't end up giving a rigorous treatment of the topic.
- pierrebai 10y agoGEB is not a study book. It's written as a multi-layered musing on various inter-connected subjects. It's also not hard to read and entertaining. I get the feeling from the anecdote about the AI professor rejecting students based on having read it and your own reaction that people in the field resent it for not being course material? I also sense a sub-text of resentment about the positions and criticisms of the author about various approach to AI. It's clearly an exposition of his philosophical basis for his position. You might disagree with him but that's no reason to be insulting.
- curuinor 10y agoIt's not so much resentment inasmuch all symbolic AI is evaporating in the shadow of the new new connectionist wave (the "new" connectionist wave being the PDP stuff). Why not, for example, see it from Hinton's philosophical point of view (besides that the papers are very boring and dry, of course)? He made a very good defense against Pylyshin and Fodor and a few critiques of Hofstadter _and_ the algorithms are shipping on Google Search and things like that.
- kabdib 10y agoI read it when it first came out; I was 18, and it was formative in my early career in CS. For someone in their teens it was a wonderful introduction to things that my high school education never really touched. I don't know if I'd have the patience to read it today.
- aleph_naught 10y agoI got about 200 pages in, and just could not continue with it. 'incomprehensible mess' would perfectly describe my sentiments. As having taken undergrad/grad courses in logic and set theory, any interesting nuggets about recursion/completeness/incompleteness/etc that one could glean from GEB can much more coherently and succinctly be obtained from a proper book on logic/computability. The counterargument would be that this book is meant as entertainment: from my experience with the first ~200 pages, it was a complete chore to read, as ideas were presented enigmatically and slowly, to the point of frustration. Granted, my attempt at reading it was almost a decade ago.
- mercer 10y agoI had trouble getting through GEB because I felt like I couldn't quite grasp logic/set theory/whatever beyond the first section or so. It's good to hear that perhaps they're not as well-explained as I thought and that perhaps other avenues make it more accessible to me. Do you have any suggestions where to start? Are there perhaps online 'starter kits' that would guide me through what courses/books/whatever to work through? I find that one of the most difficult parts of self-learning: there's often no clear syllabus available.
- sjs7007 10y agoIt seems there is a MIT OCW course on it : https://ocw.mit.edu/high-school/humanities-and-social-sciences/godel-escher-bach/ https://ocw.mit.edu/high-school/humanities-and-social-scienc....
- sudshekhar 10y agoHas anybody seen the lectures? how does it compare to reading the book? Are the lectures sufficient?
- curuinor 10y agoI heard a story from an AI professor a few years ago, who had an interesting heuristic for picking grad student applications to trash: if it mentions GEB, off it goes into the circular file. Fun book. Hofstadter actually doesn't like computers, apparently: this is in the record, and I've heard him mention that fact multiple times. He just likes playing with ideas.
- Kiro 10y ago> if it mentions GEB, off it goes into the circular file Why?
- thomasahle 10y agoProfessors are sometimes worried that students are more interested in a subject on a 'spiritual level' than they are interested in the practical, nitty gritty, hard work and math. Perhaps this one had bad experience with people who talked too much about GEB.
- jessermeyer 10y agoBecause it's a Strange Loop.
- theoh 10y agoHmm, yes, I can see a product idea here: Klein bottle waste baskets. When your waste basket is nonorientable, life becomes much simpler. Everything is both inside and outside the trash.
- vram22 10y agoHe he, good one. That reminds me of a joke I once made, in some relevant context, referencing Heisenberg and Pauli, but I'm uncertain what it was now, so I'll exclude it from here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_Pauli https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfgang_Pauli https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Heisenberg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Heisenberg
- 40acres 10y agoI bought this book a few months ago, it's been sitting on my shelf because of its intimidating size (plus the fact that I have a few other books I want to work through) but this review has definitely bumped it up my reading list.
- rhizome 10y agoA friend calls it "the most popular book that nobody has read," but maybe that was more accurate in the 90s.
- macintux 10y agoHofstadter gave the keynote at Strange Loop a few years ago (the conference was named after his ideas, so Alex Miller was thrilled when he accepted). Quite an interesting talk. https://www.infoq.com/presentations/strange-loop-keynote https://www.infoq.com/presentations/strange-loop-keynote
- jkaptur 10y agoI didn't get a lot out of GEB, but I pored over Metamagical Themas [0]. It was perfect for a teenager just learning programming. The bite-sized nature of it makes it extremely approachable - perhaps a case of constraints (periodic column of N words) leading to more creative output. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Metamagical-Themas-Questing-Essence-Pattern/dp/0465045669 https://www.amazon.com/Metamagical-Themas-Questing-Essence-P...
- donquichotte 10y agoIn my opinion, this is one of the most overrated books ever. It's a painfully long, tedious, masturbatory, self-aggrandizing collection of loosely related tales. The idea of self-similarity is somewhat interesting, but certainly not 1500-pages-of-incoherent-ramblings interesting. I have no idea how this won the Pulitzer prize, probably the judges just could not admit that it was too tedious to finish.
- lebca 10y agoWhile I have not read the book, when I've spoken about it to reputable Bach musicologists and logicians, one group says Hofstadter misinterprets Bach's work and tries to create something that actually isn't there while the other says he oversimplifies Gödel's work to the point that it is uninteresting and misleading. I haven't found a visual artist who's read it to discuss the Escher parts. These opinions steered me away from it, so I'm curious about you having a more rewarding experience.
- JelteF 10y agoI'm neither a Bach musicologist or a logician (although I've had multiple logic courses). But that might be the reason why I enjoy the book very much. Hofstadter explains complex stuff in a style that makes it very accessible without needing almost any preexisting knowledge in the discussed fields.
- p1esk 10y agoMy experience with the book was similar to my experiences listening to Bach's WTC, understanding Godel theorems, or looking at Escher's Relativity. Just start reading it.
- smogcutter 10y agoI really enjoyed the book, but suspect (with no authority other than a gut feeling based on experience) that it's in the same genre as Guns, Germs & Steel - an attractively complete system that would not hold up to an expert in the field.
- rwallace 10y agoI can't comment on the Bach or Escher parts, but he does a very creditable job summarizing Gödel's work for a lay audience. Of course if you want to take up this stuff professionally, more in-depth study will be required, that goes without saying - GEB doesn't claim to be a textbook - but it is one of the best popular science books around.
- myth_drannon 10y agoThere is also an incredible keynote from PyCon 2016 by K lars Lohn about the book (and more ) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSfe5M_zG2s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSfe5M_zG2s
- reso 10y agoScrew the haters in this thread. GEB is wonderful.
- btilly 10y agoMy experience is that non-mathematicians like to have GED on their coffee tables as a conversation piece. The related book that mathematicians like is https://www.amazon.com/Mathematical-Experience-Phillip-J-Davis/dp/0395929687 https://www.amazon.com/Mathematical-Experience-Phillip-J-Dav.... (High school math is enough to enjoy it, but the more math you have, the more you'll get out it. All of the way up to the PhD level.)
- antoaravinth 10y agoI had never read this book. But I can sense how well the book would have been written by reading its summary from here[1]. [1]:https://www.quora.com/Book-Summaries-What-are-the-main-ideas-and-highlights-of-G%C3%B6del-Escher-Bach https://www.quora.com/Book-Summaries-What-are-the-main-ideas...