| Metamagical Themas |
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The subject matter of the articles is loosely woven about themes in Philosophy , Creativity , Artificial Intelligence and important social issues. The volume is substantial in size and contains extensive notes concerning responses to the articles and other information relevant to their content. (One of the notes--page 65--suggested Memetics for the study of memes.) Major themes include: self-reference in Meme s, language, art and logic; discussions of philosophical issues important in cognitive science/AI; analogies and what makes something similar to something else; and lengthy discussions of the work of Robert Axelrod on the Prisoner's Dilemma and the idea of Superrationality . The concept of superrationality and its relevance to the Cold War , environmental issues and such is accompanied by some amusing and rather stimulating notes on experiments conducted by the author at the time. Many other topics are also mentioned, all in Hofstadter's usual easy, approachable style. Another feature is the inclusion of two dialogues in the style of those appearing in '' Gödel, Escher, Bach ''. Ambigram s are mentioned. There are three articles based around the Lisp Programming Language , where Hofstadter first details the language itself, and then shows how it relates to Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem . The title is an example of wordplay: it is an Anagram of '' Mathematical Games '', the title of Martin Gardner 's column that Hofstadter's column succeeded in ''Scientific American''. FRENCH EDITION ''Metamagical Themas'' was also published in French , under the title ''Ma Themagie'' (InterEditions, 1988), the translators being Jean-Baptiste Berthelin , Jean-Luc Bonnetain, and Lise Rosenbaum. Unfortunately, the wordplay was lost in the French title, and replaced with a much weaker one, about Math and Magic. The translators had contemplated ''Le matin des metamagiciens'', which would have been a play on ''Jeux malins des mathematiciens'' (respectively, ''The Dawn of Metamagicians'', and ''Clever Tricks of Mathematicians''). However, the publisher found it too elaborate, so we are left with the simpler one. |
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