I was searching around for other things earlier today and ran across a reference to Douglas Hofstadter, probably best known for his 1979 book "Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid." I read it many years ago, found it very interesting (and a bit hard to follow). So I followed the Wikipedia link and read a longish page about Hofstadter. I think some on the list will be interested (William in regard to analogies, Cheerskep and translations, Frances and logic of systems).
Hofstadter is very interested in how cognition works and how it can be modeled by computer-type systems (but he says he isn't interested in computers!). Analogies play a large part of his approach. The Wikipedia articles says, "FARG [Fluid Analogies Research Group, a research group at Indiana University which he organized with his graduate students] models also have an overarching philosophy that all cognition is built from the making of analogies." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Hofstadter Hofstadter is also interested in consciousness, music, visual art, translation, among other things. More from the Widipedia page: At the University of Michigan and Indiana University, he co-authored, with Melanie Mitchell, a computational model of "high-level perception" Copycat and several other models of analogy-making and cognition, including the Tabletop project, co-developed with Robert French. The Copycat project was subsequently extended under the name "Metacat" by Hofstadter's doctoral student James Marshall. The Letter Spirit project, implemented by Gary McGraw and John Rehling, aims to model the act of artistic creativity by designing stylistically uniform "gridfonts" (typefaces limited to a grid). Other more recent models are Phaeaco (implemented by Harry Foundalis) and SeqSee (Abhijit Mahabal), which model high-level perception and analogy-making in the microdomains of Bongard problems and number sequences, respectively, as well as George (Francisco Lara-Dammer), which models the processes of perception and discovery in triangle geometry. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady
