Editing Metamagical Themas

{{Short description|1985 book by Douglas Hofstadter}}
{{more footnotes|date=February 2013}}

{{Infobox book
<!-- |italic title  = (see above) -->
| name              = Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern
| image             = File:Metamagical Themas.jpg
| caption           = Cover of the first edition
| alt               = 
| author            = [[Douglas Hofstadter]]
| cover_artist      = 
| country           = United States
| language          = English
| subjects          = [[Frederic Chopin]], [[free will]], [[Heisenberg principle]], [[innumeracy]], [[Lisp (programming language)|Lisp]], [[meme]]s, [[prisoner's dilemma]], [[quantum mechanics]], [[Rubik's Cube]], [[William Safire]], [[strange attractor]]s, [[Alan Turing]], etc.
| publisher         = [[Basic Books]]
| published         = 1985
| media_type        = Print
| pages             = 852
| awards            = 
| isbn              = 0-465-04566-9
| oclc              = 11475807
| dewey             = 
| congress          = 
}}

'''''Metamagical Themas''''' is an eclectic collection of articles that [[Douglas Hofstadter]] wrote for the [[popular science]] magazine ''[[Scientific American]]'' during the early 1980s. The anthology was published in 1985 by [[Basic Books]].

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]].)

==Contents==
Major themes of the columns 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 (specifically what makes, for example, an uppercase letter 'A' recognizable as such); and lengthy discussions of the work of [[Robert Axelrod (political scientist)|Robert Axelrod]] on the [[prisoner's dilemma]], as well as the idea of [[superrationality]].

The concept of superrationality, and its relevance to the [[Cold War]], environmental issues and such, is accompanied by notes on experiments conducted by the author at the time. Another notable 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 centered on the [[Lisp programming language]], in which Hofstadter first details the language itself, and then shows how it relates to [[Gödel's incompleteness theorem]]. Two articles are devoted to [[Rubik's Cube]] and similar puzzles. Many chapters open with an illustration of an extremely abstract alphabet, yet one which is still [[Gestalt psychology|gestaltly]] recognizable as such.

The game of [[Nomic]] was first introduced to the public in this column, in June 1982, when excerpts from a book (still unpublished at the time) by the game's creator [[Peter Suber]] were printed and discussed.

The index of the book mentions Hofstadter's recurring alter ego, [[Egbert B. Gebstadter]].

==List of Hofstadter's "Metamagical Themas" columns{{anchor|List of Douglas R Hofstadter Metamagical Themas columns}}==
From January 1957 through December 1980, [[Martin Gardner]]'s "[[List of Martin Gardner Mathematical Games columns|Mathematical Games]]" column was a monthly feature in ''[[Scientific American]]'' magazine. In 1981, Gardner's column alternated with a new column by Hofstadter called "Metamagical Themas" (an [[anagram]] of "Mathematical Games"). Then Hofstadter's column appeared monthly from January 1982 through July 1983.<ref>[http://www.scientificamerican.com/author/douglas-r-hofstadter/ "Stories by Douglas R. Hofstadter"]. ''Scientific American''.</ref>
{|class="wikitable"
|-
!Date !!Title
|-
|  1981 Jan ||  An anagrammatic title introduces a new contributor to this column
|-
|  1981 Mar ||  The Magic Cube's cubies are twiddled by cubists and solved by cubemeisters
|-
|  1981 May ||  A coffeehouse conversation on the Turing test to determine if a machine can think
|-
|  1981 Jul ||  Pitfalls of the uncertainty principle and paradoxes of quantum mechanics
|-
|  1981 Sep ||  How might analogy, the core of human thinking, be understood by computers?
|-
|  1981 Nov ||  Strange attractors: mathematical patterns delicately poised between order and chaos
|-
|  1982 Jan ||  A self-referential column about last January's column about self-reference
|-
|  1982 Feb ||  About two kinds of inquiry: "National Enquirer" and "The Skeptical Inquirer"
|-
|  1982 Mar ||  Is the genetic code an arbitrary one, or would another code work as well?
|-
|  1982 Apr ||  The music of Frédéric Chopin: startling aural patterns that also startle the eye
|-
|  1982 May ||  Number numbness, or why innumeracy may be just as dangerous as illiteracy
|-
|  1982 Jun ||  About Nomic: a heroic game that explores the reflexivity of the law
|-
|  1982 Jul ||  Beyond Rubik's Cube: spheres, pyramids, dodecahedrons and God knows what else
|-
|  1982 Aug ||  Undercut, Flaunt, Hruska, behavioral evolution and other games of strategy
|-
|  1982 Sep ||  Can inspiration be mechanized?
|-
|  1982 Oct ||  Variations on a theme as the essence of imagination
|-
|  1982 Nov ||  "Default assumptions" and their effects on writing and thinking
|-
|  1982 Dec ||  Sense makes more sense than nonsense, but nonsense may still have its purposes
|-
|  1983 Jan ||  Virus-like sentences and self-replicating structures
|-
|  1983 Feb ||  The pleasures of Lisp: the chosen language of artificial intelligence
|-
|  1983 Mar ||  Tripping the light recursive in Lisp, the language of artificial intelligence
|-
|  1983 Apr ||  In which a discourse on the language Lisp concludes with a gargantuan Italian feast
|-
|  1983 May ||  Computer tournaments of the Prisoner's Dilemma suggest how cooperation evolves
|-
|  1983 Jun ||  The calculus of cooperation is tested through a lottery
|-
|  1983 Jul ||  Parquet deformations: patterns of tiles that shift gradually in one dimension
|-
|}

==French edition==
{{unsourced|section|date=July 2023}}
''Metamagical Themas'' was also published in French, under the title ''Ma Thémagie'' (InterEditions, 1988), the translators being Jean-Baptiste Berthelin, Jean-Luc Bonnetain, and Lise Rosenbaum.

The wordplay was lost in the French title, and replaced with another one (''ma Thémagie'' would translate to "my themagy", where "themagy" is a [[neologism]], but could also be read as ''maths et magie'', which translates to "maths and magic"). The translators had contemplated ''Le matin des métamagiciens'', which would have been a play on Hofstadter's title plus ''Le Matin des Magiciens'' and ''Jeux malins des mathématiciens'' (respectively, ''The Dawn of the Magicians'' and ''Clever Tricks of Mathematicians''); however, the publisher found that suggestion to be too elaborate.

==Reception==
[[David Langford|Dave Langford]] reviewed ''Metamagical Themas'' for ''[[White Dwarf (magazine)|White Dwarf]]'' #88, and stated that "a heady mixture of computers, art, mathematics, philosophy, jokes and above all games."<ref name="WD88">{{cite magazine  | last =Langford | first =Dave | author-link =David Langford | title =Critical Mass  | magazine =[[White Dwarf (magazine)|White Dwarf]]  | issue =88  | pages =8   | publisher =[[Games Workshop]]  | date = April 1987  }}</ref>

==References==
{{reflist}}

==External links==
* {{Google books |id = qa85DgAAQBAJ}}
* "[http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html A Person Paper on Purity in Language]", one of the included essays, first published in September 1983

{{Douglas Hofstadter}}

[[Category:1985 books]]
[[Category:Basic Books books]]
[[Category:Books by Douglas Hofstadter]]
[[Category:Cognitive science literature]]
[[Category:Philosophy books]]
[[Category:Works originally published in American magazines]]
[[Category:Works originally published in science and technology magazines]]