Editing Douglas Hofstadter (section)

== Columnist ==
When [[Martin Gardner]] retired from writing his "[[Mathematical Games (column)|Mathematical Games]]" column for ''[[Scientific American]]'' magazine, Hofstadter succeeded him in 1981–83 with a column titled ''[[Metamagical Themas]]'' (an [[anagram]] of "Mathematical Games"). An idea he introduced in one of these columns was the concept of "Reviews of This Book", a book containing nothing but cross-referenced reviews of itself that has an online implementation.<ref>[http://www.reenigne.org/blog/review/ Online implementation of his ''Reviews of this Book'' idea] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090107122927/http://www.reenigne.org/blog/review/ |date=January 7, 2009 }}</ref> One of Hofstadter's columns in ''Scientific American'' concerned the damaging effects of sexist language, and two chapters of his book ''[[Metamagical Themas]]'' are devoted to that topic, one of which is a biting analogy-based satire, "[http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html A Person Paper on Purity in Language]" (1985), in which the reader's presumed revulsion at racism and racist language is used as a lever to motivate an analogous revulsion at sexism and sexist language; Hofstadter published it under the pseudonym William Satire, an allusion to [[William Safire]].<ref>[http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html A Person Paper on Purity in Language] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150516222831/http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html |date=May 16, 2015 }} by William Satire (alias Douglas R. Hofstadter), 1985 – a satirical piece, on the subject of sexist language</ref> Another column reported on the discoveries made by University of Michigan professor [[Robert Axelrod (political scientist)|Robert Axelrod]] in his computer tournament pitting many iterated [[prisoner's dilemma]] strategies against each other, and a follow-up column discussed a similar tournament that Hofstadter and his graduate student Marek Lugowski organized.{{citation needed|date=February 2014}} The "Metamagical Themas" columns ranged over many themes, including patterns in [[Frédéric Chopin]]'s piano music (particularly his [[Études (Chopin)|études]]), the concept of [[superrationality]] (choosing to cooperate when the other party/adversary is assumed to be equally intelligent as oneself), and the [[self-modifying game]] of [[Nomic]], based on the way the legal system modifies itself, and developed by philosopher [[Peter Suber]].<ref>''Metamagical Themas'', Douglas R. Hofstadter, Basic Books, New York (1985), see preface, introduction, contents listing.</ref>