Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R Hofstadter

How could you resist a math book that name drops a great composer and artist in the title? The book ties together the works of the two brilliantly with the Gödel's incompleteness theorem. Examples abound of self-referencing or self-continuing systems. Escher has drawings that seem to extend up endlessly. Bach has compositions that go up only to be back where they started. 

Alas, the book is incredibly verbose. The preface to the 20th Anniversary edition goes on for more than 20 pages. The book itself extends beyond 700 pages. The chapters are mostly in couplets, with the first being a conversation between Tortoise and Achilles, followed by a chapter containing detailed analysis. The author was inspired by Lewis Carroll in approach, but not in succinctness. By the end, I was speed skimming. Perhaps I should have just read the outline at the start. The only problem with that would be missing out on the various drawings (primarily from Escher) included. The author did mention that he started out writing a paper and then transformed it into a book. It would have been nice to see that paper.

The first part of the book talks about incompleteness and systems that return on themselves or require themselves for definition. It elaborates that ad nauseum, and then focuses more on artificial intelligence. The view of machine learning and artificial intelligence from a 45 years ago is much different than today.  At that time approaching human capabilities was seen as fairly impossible. Things are much closer now. The approach has also changed. Rather than try to create detailed decision trees, today most machine learning is done from models and training. AI "learns" and helps program itself. The book can be an interesting reference on the history of artificial intelligence and how things have changed in the past decades.