From rehling@nickel.ucs.indiana.edu Mon Feb 20 14:22:18 EST 1995 Article: 27584 of comp.ai Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!howland.reston.ans.net!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!usenet.ucs.indiana.edu!nickel.ucs.indiana.edu!rehling From: rehling@nickel.ucs.indiana.edu (John Rehling) Newsgroups: comp.ai Subject: New Book by Douglas Hofstadter Date: 18 Feb 1995 20:55:24 GMT Organization: Indiana University, Bloomington Lines: 54 Message-ID: <3i5mrs$hu5@usenet.ucs.indiana.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: nickel.ucs.indiana.edu Douglas Hofstadter, author of _Godel, Escher, Bach_ and the Scientific American column and book _Metamagical Themas_, has a new book out. While the first two books discussed a number of ideas relevant to artificial intelligence and cognitive science, such as recursivity and emergent behavior. The new book, _Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies_ writes from a much later perspective, looking back at the models of creativity and analogy-making that have been implemented on computers by Doug and his graduate students, some of the issues that came up along the way, and how they were resolved. The book is co-written by members of Doug's research group, the Fluid Analogy Research Group (FARG). The book is available through Basic Books, ISBN # 0-465-05154-5. Here's a table of contents to give a better idea of what FCCA is all about: Prologue: The Why, the When, the Where, and the Who of This Book Chapter 1: To Seek Whence Cometh a Sequence Preface 2: The Unconscious Juggling of Mental Objects Chapter 2: The Architecture of Jumbo Preface 3: Arithmetical Play and Nondeterminism Chapter 3: Numbo: A Study in Cognition and Recognition Preface 4: The Ineradicable Eliza Effect and Its Dangers Chapter 4: High-level Perception, Representation, and Analogy: A Critique of Artificial-Intelligence Methodology Preface 5: Conceptual Halos and Slippability Chapter 5: The Copycat Project: A Model of Mental Fluidity and Analogy-making Preface 6: Two Early AI Approaches to Analogy Chapter 6: Perspectives on Copycat: Comparisons with Recent Work Preface 7: Retrieval of Old and Invention of New Analogies Chapter 7: Prologomena to Any Future Metacat Preface 8: Analogy-making in a Coffeehouse Chapter 8: Tabletop, BattleOp, Ob-Platte, Potelbat, Belpatto, Platobet Preface 9: The Knotty Problem of Evaluating Research in AI and Cognitive Science Chapter 9: The Emergent Personality of Tabletop, a Perception-based Model of Analogy-making Preface 10: The Intoxicating World of Alphabets and Their Styles Chapter 10: Letter Spirit: Esthetic Perception and Creative Play in the Rich Microcosm of the Roman Alphabet Epilogue: On Computers, Creativity, Credit, Brain Mechanisms, and the Turing Test I hope that the book pleases the audience as much as Doug's earlier work has. -JAR -- Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened. -Thomas Hardy