Metamagical Themas is an eclectic collection of articles written for
Scientific American during the early
1980s by
Douglas Hofstadter, and published together as a book in 1985 by
Basic Books (ISBN 0-465-04566-9).
The subject matter of the articles is loosely woven about themes in
philosophy,
creativity,
artificial intelligence,
typography and
fonts, and important social issues. The volume is substantial in size and contains extensive notes concerning responses to the articles and other information relevant to their content. (One of the notes--page 65--suggested
memetics for the study of
memes.)
Major themes include: self-reference in
memes, language, art and logic; discussions of philosophical issues important in cognitive science/AI; analogies and what makes something similar to something else (specifically what makes, for example, an uppercase letter 'A' recognisable as such); and lengthy discussions of the work of
Robert Axelrod on the
prisoner's dilemma and the idea of
superrationality.
The concept of superrationality and its relevance to the
Cold War, environmental issues and such is accompanied by some amusing and rather stimulating notes on experiments conducted by the author at the time. Another notable feature is the inclusion of two dialogues in the style of those appearing in
Gödel, Escher, Bach.
Ambigrams are mentioned.
There are three articles centered on the
Lisp programming language, where Hofstadter first details the language itself, and then shows how it relates to
Gödel's incompleteness theorem. Two articles are devoted to
Rubik's Cube and other such puzzles. Many other topics are also mentioned, all in Hofstadter's usual easy, approachable style. Many chapters open with an illustration of an extremely abstract alphabet, yet one which is still recognizable as such.
The game of
Nomic was first introduced to the public in this column, in June 1982, when excerpts from a book (still unpublished at the time) by the game's creator
Peter Suber were printed and discussed.
The title is an example of wordplay: it is an
anagram of
Mathematical Games, the title of
Martin Gardner's column that Hofstadter's column succeeded in
Scientific American.
Essays
Essays include:
French edition
Metamagical Themas was also published in
French, under the title
Ma Themagie (InterEditions, 1988), the translators being
Jean-Baptiste Berthelin, Jean-Luc Bonnetain, and Lise Rosenbaum.
Unfortunately, the wordplay was lost in the French title, and replaced with a much weaker one, about Math, Magic, and Themes. The translators had contemplated
Le matin des metamagiciens, which would have been a play on Hofstadter's title plus
Le Matin des Magiciens and
Jeux malins des mathematiciens (respectively,
The Dawn of the Magicians and
Clever Tricks of Mathematicians); however, the publisher found that suggestion to be too elaborate.
Scientific American is a popular-science magazine, published (first weekly and later monthly) since August 28, 1845, making it the oldest continuously published magazine in the United States.
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worldwide view of the subject.
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Born: January 15 1945 (1945--) (age 62)
New York, New York
Occupation: Professor of cognitive science
Nationality: United States
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Basic Books is a book publisher founded in 1952. It publishes books in the fields of psychology, science, politics, sociology, , and history.
Basic Books is a member of the Perseus Books Group.
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..... Click the link for more information. Philosophy is the discipline concerned with questions of how one should live (ethics); what sorts of things exist and what are their essential natures (metaphysics); what counts as genuine knowledge (epistemology); and what are the correct principles of reasoning (logic).
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Creativity (or creativeness) is a mental process involving the generation of new ideas or concepts, or new associations between existing ideas or concepts.
From a scientific point of view, the products of creative thought (sometimes referred to as divergent thought)
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artificial intelligence (or AI) is "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions which maximizes its chances of success.
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Typography is the art and techniques of type design, modifying type glyphs, and arranging type. Type glyphs (characters) are created and modified using a variety of illustration techniques.
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Please help recruit one or [ improve this article] yourself. See the talk page for details.
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Memetics is an approach to evolutionary models of information transfer based on the concept of the meme. Just as memes are analogous to genes, memetics is analogous to genetics.
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This article or section may contain original research or unverified claims.Please help Wikipedia by adding references. See the for details.
This article has been tagged since September 2007.
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This article has been tagged since September 2007.
..... Click the link for more information. - For the actor, see Robert Axelrod (actor).
Robert Axelrod (born 1943) is a Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at the University of Michigan. He has appointments in the Department of Political Science and the Gerald R.
..... Click the link for more information. prisoner's dilemma (sometimes abbreviated PD) is a type of non-zero-sum game in which two players may each "cooperate" with or "defect" (i.e. betray) the other player.
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The concept of superrationality is discussed in Douglas Hofstadter's book "Metamagical Themas"[1]. Superrationality is a type of rational decision making which is different than the usual game-theoretic one, since a superrational player playing against a superrational
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The Cold War was the period of conflict, tension and competition between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies from the mid-1940s until the early 1990s.
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Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid
Author Douglas Hofstadter
Country USA
Language English
Subject(s) Consciousness, intelligence
Publisher Basic Books
Publication date 1979
Pages 777 pages
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ambigram, also sometimes known as an inversion, is a graphical figure that spells out a word not only in its form as presented, but also in another direction or orientation.
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Lisp
Paradigm: multi-paradigm: functional, procedural, reflective
Appeared in: 1958
Designed by: John McCarthy
Developer: Steve Russell, Timothy P. Hart, and Mike Levin
Typing discipline: dynamic, strong
Dialects: Common Lisp, Scheme, Emacs Lisp
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In mathematical logic, Gödel's incompleteness theorems, proved by Kurt Gödel in 1931, are two theorems stating inherent limitations of all but the most trivial formal systems for arithmetic of mathematical interest.
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Rubik's Cube (commonly misspelled rubix, rubick's or rubicscube) is a mechanical puzzle invented in 1974[1] by the Hungarian sculptor and professor of architecture Ernő Rubik.
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Nomic is a game in which the rules of the game include mechanisms for the players to change those rules, usually beginning through a system of democratic voting.
- Nomic is a game in which changing the rules is a move.
..... Click the link for more information. Peter Suber (born November 8, 1951) is the creator of the game Nomic and a leading voice in the open access movement. He is the senior research professor of philosophy at Earlham College, the open access project director at Public Knowledge, and a senior researcher at SPARC
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anagram (Greek anagramma 'letters written anew', passive participle of ana- 'again' + gramma 'letter') is a type of word play, the result of rearranging the letters of a word or phrase to produce other words, using all the original letters exactly once; e.
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Martin Gardner (b. October 21, 1914, Tulsa, Oklahoma) is a popular American mathematics and science writer specializing in recreational mathematics, but with interests encompassing magic (conjuring), pseudoscience, literature (especially Lewis Carroll), philosophy, and religion.
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French (français, pronounced [fʁɑ̃ˈsɛ]) is a Romance language originally spoken in France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Switzerland, and today by about 300 million people around the world as either
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Jean-Baptiste Berthelin, also known informally as Cochonfucius, is a French cognitive science researcher.
He is connected to the Human-Machine Communication Department of the Laboratoire d'Informatique pour la Mécanique et les Sciences de l'Ingénieur (LIMSI).
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