weemba@brahms.BERKELEY.EDU (Matthew P. Wiener) (03/23/86)
In article <725@hounx.UUCP> kort@hounx.UUCP (B.KORT) writes: >>Ummm, what works of Smullyan are you refering to? I have >>about 5 of his books (one on formal logic, two on retrograde >>chess analysis, two on popularized logic {like What Is The Name >>Of This Book}). He also gave a talk in Berkeley a few years ago >>that I had the pleasure of hearing. >> >>Also, I never took Hofstatder seriously after reading GEB. >>Was that a mistake? Smullyan titles appropriate to the question include: >The Tao is Silent 5000 BC This Book Needs No Title >[Matthew, you may wish to tune out at this juncture.] >Hofstadter is whimsical in his imagery, but deadly serious in his >quest for deeper understanding. He is basically a translator who >takes arcane material and dresses it up for a larger audience. >Hof is teaching us how to play, be creative, be entertaining, >and learn to enjoy ourselves as we learn. I love him. [Barry, you may wish to tune out at this juncture.] But Hofstadter does a poor and deceptive and irritating job. He uses the gosh-wiz-aren't-I-clever technique until I want to puke. I remember reading one chapter of GEB, noticing some big letters, so I spelled them out at that point. And then later in the chapter he points out how clever he was. Sure. To illustrate recursion he picked a complicated example from his thesis in physics, saying you can't really understand this but don't worry. Utterly unnecessary and highly irritating. Binomial coefficients are a much more accessible example. His summary of the impact of Godel's theorem on mathematicians of the time is mostly wrong and misleading. In his discussion of the ants as a separate entity, he never makes it clear that this his just his analogy, having nothing to do with actual entomology. It was a popular theory in the 1930's, but a small word to the wise would not have hurt. In discussing Vinograd's ETAION SHRDLU, he does not let the reader know that Vinograd has become one of the apostates of AI, based on his own experiences with his own program. The book was really GB, with E playing an almost trivial role, except for one or two prints. Escher deserves a lot better treatment. Reading GEB was a VERY strange experience. I start the book agreeing with his entire thesis, and by the end of the book I have serious doubts if AI has any hopes at all of getting out of it's current rut. For one thing, if all of AI is as excerebrose as DH is, they won't ever be able to program themselves out of a wet paper bag. I remember Metamagical Themas when it was in _Scientific American_. One or two articles on self-reference is tolerable, but after a while he was stuck in an awful rut. Yes, he had an article on Rubik's cube and an article on the dynamics of iterated interval maps, both quite good. But when returned to his favorite topics, he returned to his usual style. I started one article on Turing's test that had three sexually ambiguously named characters, and stopped reading the article right after I began it. Why? Because later on he was going to discuss the male/female part of the original Turing Test, and then point out how clever he was in running the same test on me. If DH has a point, it need not ALWAYS be made by slamming it into my face. *I* don't call that clever, but he does. Far more effective would be to have not said anything at all, and let the reader notice, perhaps a year later, what he did. That is called genuine style. DH has none. [This last paragraph could be all wrong, of course. He may very well have not finished the article as I am hypothesizing. But some people are just so damned predictable.] Perhaps this is the price I pay for knowing too much modern science--writers like Hofstadter will always irritate me. ucbvax!brahms!weemba Matthew P Wiener/UCB Math Dept/Berkeley CA 94720
tim@ism780c.UUCP (Tim Smith) (03/29/86)
In article <12561@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> weemba@brahms.UUCP (Matthew P. Wiener) writes: > >To illustrate recursion he picked a complicated example from his thesis in >physics, saying you can't really understand this but don't worry. Utterly >unnecessary and highly irritating. Binomial coefficients are a much more >accessible example. Before he gives the example from physics, he gives examples using Fibonacci numbers, and transition networks, and graphs. I don't think there is anything wrong with giving a complicated example _after_ giving several simple examples. -- Just picking nits on a Friday evening, waiting for traffic to settle down so I can go home... Tim Smith sdcrdcf!ism780c!tim || ima!ism780!tim || ihnp4!cithep!tim