Gödel, Escher, Bach. Un'eterna ghirlanda brillante. Una fuga metaforica su menti e macchine nello spirito di Lewis Carroll

Expand your mind! Not for the faint of heart & yet by no means dry. Hofstadter makes some fascinating observations about emergent properties (such as intelligence) and diverts us into the extremely heavy mathematics of Godel via the self referencing systems that are Bach's fugues and Escher's 'optic Leggi tutto

This is a nice book if you want to understand the Gödel incompleteness proof, and get an account that is both accessible and reasonably rigorous. There's a lot of other fun stuff as well, but it's the Gödel proof that's the core of the book, and if that doesn't turn you on then you aren't really goi Leggi tutto

As I work my way through this dense book, I am reminded of the Zen tale of 4 blind men and an elephant. To settle a dispute between townspeople over religion, the Zen master had 4 blind men and an elephant led in. With the men not knowing it’s an elephant, the Zen master had each feel a part of the Leggi tutto

I could not with a clear conscience recommend this book to everyone, because I'm simply not that cruel. It would be like recommending large doses of LSD to everyone: some small minority will find the experience invaluably enlightening, but for most people it's just going to melt their brain. While yo Leggi tutto

This book is a must read or at least must selectively skim for anyone interested in intelligence. Some of the ideas regarding intelligence and how it should be implemented are perhaps slightly outdated (you would see much more statistical reasoning if you asked experts today), which is largely absen Leggi tutto

Gödel, Escher, Bach is really something unique and special. The book attempts to put forward the outline of a theory of intelligence, by drawing from an incredibly wide array of disciplines - not just the three (mathematics, art and music), which are implied by the title – but also logical systems, Leggi tutto