Essay in the Style of Douglas Hofstadter
Hofstadter, Douglas (Indiana University)
It was written not by a human being, but by my computer program EWI (an acronym for "experiments in writing intelligence"). EWI was fed the texts of two of Hofstadter's books--namely, Gödel, Escher, Bach (winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1980) and Metamagical Themas--and then, following its code, EWI carefully analyzed these two books for their uniquely Hofstadterian stylistic elements and features, after which it recombined these stylistic elements in new fashions. EWI thereby came up with some 25 new and highly diverse "Hofstadter articles," one of which is given below, and the article is followed by a brief commentary about EWI and its output by Hofstadter himself. Actually, I should state up front that the wonderful sparkling dialogues of GEB, which are a substantial part of that book, were not used by EWI in generating any of the articles, because EWI is unfortunately not yet able to work with inputs that belong to different genres, such as chapters and dialogues. To combine stylistic aspects of two or more different genres of writing represents a very thorny challenge indeed. Endowing EWI with that extra level of flexibility is one of my next major goals.
Oct-20-2009
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