This endless festoon

It is surprising that such a book as this one has not yet been seen on Habré. I can not try to correct this defect.
So, I want to introduce you to the book of American informatics Douglas Robert Hofstadter "Gödel, Escher, Bach: this endless festoon".

Achilles: Now, if the book was called “Gorillas, silver, gold” or “Emu, gold ...” - then I could still understand ...
Turtle: Perhaps you would prefer “Copper, silver, baboons”?

Being written over thirty years ago, this incredible work has not lost its interestingness.
')


The BBB is full of puns and meanings, levels of nesting and overlapping, breaks of the fourth wall, fifth and Nth. The BBB is a book about the logic of abstractions, written not by dry formulas but by living examples. Strange characters created by the author lead each chapter to strange dialogues in the style of Lewis Carroll, and then the author explains the meaning, sub-meaning and meta-meaning of their conversation in simple language without much mathematics.

Achilles: Wow! .. What can I wish for? And, I know: it occurred to me even when I first read “A Thousand and One Nights” - these unintelligible tales, inserted one into the other like a matryoshka. I want to have not three, but hundred desires? Great, really, Ms. Ch.? I never understood why these boobies in fairy tales do not realize asking for the same thing?
Turtle: Maybe now you will understand.
Genius: I'm sorry, Achilles, but I do not fulfill the meta-desires.
Achilles: I would like to know what meta-desire is ...
Genius: But this is meta-meta-desire, Achilles, and I cannot fulfill them either.
Achilles: What about? I do not understand anything ...

What are Achilles and the Turtle talking about? About different. About Bach's music, pictures of Escher and the logic of Gödel. About artificial and natural intelligence. On the musical canon with elements of palindrome. About programming languages. On the hands, painting themselves. On the Fermat and Goldbach theorems. About the perfect gramophone, losing any record. About a record with a resonant frequency, chosen to destroy the perfect gramophone. About the human genome. About Zen philosophy. And, all the time, through the text or in the open - about the logic of Gödel, the pictures of Escher and the music of Bach.



The BBB does not look like the pure fantasy of the author, like many other books. Rather, it is a guide to the worlds of infinite nesting of meanings and recursions, born simultaneously with logic (that is, the former always). This is what helps to better understand the abstract subtleties of programming. And ponder the strange questions of being. Gödel, Escher, Bach is the best philosophical book on abstractions you can read.

By the way, since you have reached this place, it’s time for you to stop listening to my enthusiastic speeches, and to start studying the book itself. It is easy to find online, for example, here . Although, you already read the BBB? Or read in the future? Or are you reading?

Crab: I see. Your book seems rather interesting. Perhaps I'll read it sometime. (Scrolls the manuscript, stopping at the last Dialogue.)
Author: I think that you will be particularly interested in the last Dialogue, because there are some interesting remarks about improvisation, uttered by a rather funny hero - namely, you!
Crab: Really? And what did you make me talk?
Author: Wait a minute and you will see for yourself. All of this is part of the Dialogue.
Achilles: You want to say that we are all in the Dialogue NOW?
Author: Of course! And you thought not?