Essay in the Style of Douglas Hofstadter EWI Explanatory Note

The following article was written in the style of my good friend the writer and cognitive scientist Doug Hofstadter. 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. All 25 articles generated by EWI (which, incidentally, it generated at the pathetically slow rate of 10 minutes per piece, as it was running on an outmoded PowerBook dating from 1994, whereas on a Macintosh today it would be closer to 30 seconds per piece) had roughly the same level of literary quality and originality, and the topics EWI wound up writing about were highly variegated—for example, an " i "-less version of chapter 9 of Aldous Huxley's novel Eyeless in Gaza, a comparison between three mathematical theorems and three human faces, an essay about James Clerk Maxwell's youthful study of the rings of Saturn, a short biography of Alexander Pushkin written in anti-One-gin stanzas, an analysis of 10 favorite " bon mots " by Hofstadter's friend David Moser, and so forth and so on. All these topics emerged automatically from EWI's stylistic analysis of the two books men-tioned—I played no role whatsoever in the process. My only role came later—it was to choose one article for publication, and I chose this particular one simply because I felt that …