Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies

Douglas Hofstadter's new book is called Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought. While the first two books, Goedel, Escher, Bach and Metamagical Themas discussed a number of ideas relevant to artificial intelligence and cognitive science, such as recursivity and emergent behavior, the new book looks back from the perspective of having grappled with those ideas in the course of implementing actual computer models. Programs that model creativity and analogy-making have been designed by Doug and his graduate students, and the story of their past, present and future development is the subject of the book, co-authored by the students in the Fluid Analogies Research Group (FARG). See the table of contents.

The book is available through Basic Books (a division of HarperCollins), ISBN #0-465-05154-5. To order by phone, call (212) 207-7057 or FAX (212) 207-7203.

Prologue: The Why, the When, the Where, and the Who of This Book
Chapter 1: To Seek Whence Cometh a Sequence
(Douglas Hofstadter)
Preface 2: The Unconscious Juggling of Mental Objects
Chapter 2: The Architecture of Jumbo
(Douglas Hofstadter)
Preface 3: Arithmetical Play and Nondeterminism
Chapter 3: Numbo: A Study in Cognition and Recognition
(Daniel Defays)
Preface 4: The Ineradicable Eliza Effect and Its Dangers
Chapter 4: High-level Perception, Representation, and Analogy: A Critique of Artificial-Intelligence Methodology
(David Chalmers, Robert French, and Douglas Hofstadter)
Preface 5: Conceptual Halos and Slippability
Chapter 5: The Copycat Project: A Model of Mental Fluidity and Analogy-making
(Douglas Hofstadter and Melanie Mitchell)
Preface 6: Two Early AI Approaches to Analogy
Chapter 6: Perspectives on Copycat: Comparisons with Recent Work
(Melanie Mitchell and Douglas Hofstadter)
Preface 7: Retrieval of Old and Invention of New Analogies
Chapter 7: Prologomena to Any Future Metacat
(Douglas Hofstadter)
Preface 8: Analogy-making in a Coffeehouse
Chapter 8: Tabletop, BattleOp, Ob-Platte, Potelbat, Belpatto, Platobet
(Douglas Hofstadter and Robert French)
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
(Douglas Hofstadter and Robert French)
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
(Douglas Hofstadter and Gary McGraw)
Epilogue: On Computers, Creativity, Credit, Brain Mechanisms, and the Turing Test

You may be interested in reading the review by Byte (March 1995).

Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies

Table of Contents