Complexity : A Guided Tour by Mitchell Melanie

Author:Mitchell, Melanie [Mitchell, Melanie]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2009-03-31T16:00:00+00:00

Being a Copycat

Doug Hofstadter’s plan was for me to write a computer program that could make analogies in the letter-string world by employing the same kinds of mechanisms that he believed are responsible for human analogy-making in general. He already had a name for this (as yet nonexistent) program: “Copycat.” The idea is that analogy-making is a subtle form of imitation—for example, ijk needs to imitate what happened when abc changed to abd, using concepts relevant in its own context. Thus the program’s job was to be a clever and creative copycat.

I began working on this project at MIT in the summer of 1984. That fall, Hofstadter started a new faculty position at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. I also moved there and enrolled as a Ph.D. student. It took a total of six years of working closely with Doug for me to construct the program he envisioned—the devil, of course, is in the details. Two results came out of this: a program that could make human-like analogies in its microworld, and (finally) my Ph.D.

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