Book/author recommendation: Hofstadter

Douglas Hofstadter also came up in the text. There's a book by him that I highly recommend : Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.



It's an excellent book exploring some of the issues surrounding AI and the study of cognition, as represented in the works of the three people in the title: Kurt Gödel, who was an Austrian mathematician working with ideas about what a logical system can accomplish, the artist M.C. Escher, and the composer J.S. Bach. The material is dense, but it's written for the layperson (honest! Not the way our text is "accessible to the layperson"), and uses a series of dialogues in the style of Lewis Carol, or the Greek philosophers to introduce each chapter's topic. Good stuff.