X-Nico

6 unusual facts about Metamagical Themas


Aronson's sequence

In Douglas Hofstadter's book Metamagical Themas, the sequence is credited to J. K. Aronson of Oxford, England; it is based on the observation that ordinal numbers in the English language always end in "th".

Egbert B. Gebstadter

Gebstadter's third book appears in the bibliography to Hofstadter's third book, Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern.

Jean-Baptiste Berthelin

He was one of the team responsible for translating Douglas Hofstadter's book Metamagical Themas into French, the others being Jean-Luc Bonnetain and Lise Rosenbaum.

Metamagical Themas

The game of Nomic was first introduced to the public in this column, in June 1982, when excerpts from a book (still unpublished at the time) by the game's creator Peter Suber were printed and discussed.

Metamagical Themas was also published in French, under the title Ma Thémagie (InterEditions, 1988), the translators being Jean-Baptiste Berthelin, Jean-Luc Bonnetain, and Lise Rosenbaum.

Major themes include: self-reference in memes, language, art and logic; discussions of philosophical issues important in cognitive science/AI; analogies and what makes something similar to something else (specifically what makes, for example, an uppercase letter 'A' recognisable as such); and lengthy discussions of the work of Robert Axelrod on the prisoner's dilemma and the idea of superrationality.



see also