An Interview with Douglas R. Hofstadter, following ''I am a Strange Loop''

Douglas R. Hofstadter is best-known for his book Gödel, Escher, Bach (GEB for short). In his latest book, I am a Strange Loop, he visits once again many of the themes originally presented in that book. The interview below was conducted in September 2007 and was originally published, in Hebrew, in the online culture magazine Haayal Hakore. The interview was conducted by Tal Cohen and Yarden Nir-Buchbinder. The first part of I am a Strange Loop reads like a condensed version of GEB, by explaining the idea of consciousness as a strange loop. I certainly did not believe intelligent machines were just around the corner when I wrote GEB. Am I disappointed by the amount of progress in cognitive science and AI in the past 30 years or so? I am a deep admirer of humanity at its finest and deepest and most powerful — of great people such as Helen Keller, Albert Einstein, Ella Fitzgerald, Albert Schweitzer, Frederic Chopin, Raoul Wallenberg, Fats Waller, and on and on. We'll return to Kurzweil soon.

RoboChamps Ian Pearson, Futurologist: The ITWales Interview Date: 2006-09-25 Category: Interviews Ian Pearson works as a Futurologist for BT, where he tracks technological and societal developments to make predictions for the future. Specialising in the long term, Pearson uses his background in science and engineering, together with analytical tools, business skills and good old fashioned common sense to develop his predictions. Sali Earls indulged in a bit of crystal ball gazing and spoke at length to Ian Pearson , discussing the sometimes dark, often controversial visions for the future brought about by technological advances. It’s kind of like being in a car and having someone looking out of the window as you’re driving along - it’s the business equivalent of that really. It’s a question of second guessing what people will do, which requires sitting around and talking about it an awful lot really. In terms of keeping up, I wouldn’t say that I do. Yes. The other side of AI says that . I think some of us certainly will. It’s going to disappear.

Boids In 1986 I made a computer model of coordinated animal motion such as bird flocks and fish schools. It was based on three dimensional computational geometry of the sort normally used in computer animation or computer aided design. I called the generic simulated flocking creatures boids. Each boid has direct access to the whole scene's geometric description, but flocking requires that it reacts only to flockmates within a certain small neighborhood around itself. a boid's neighborhood A slightly more elaborate behavioral model was used in the early experiments. In cooperation with many coworkers at the Symbolics Graphics Division and Whitney / Demos Productions, we made an animated short featuring the boids model called Stanley and Stella in: Breaking the Ice. Since 1987 there have been many other applications of the boids model in the realm of behavioral animation. A significant property of life-like behavior is unpredictability over moderate time scales. Software Boids C++ Boids Buzzz!