Hofstadter - Gödel, Escher, Bach 20th Anniv. Ed. - FIXED

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
By Douglas R. Hofstadter, 1979 (20th anniversary edition with new preface released 1999)
ISBN-10: 0465026567
ISBN-13: 978-0465026562
Language: English (with short snippets of French, German, Latin and other languages)
Size: 82.7MB, 794 pages
Format: PDF

"Twenty years after it topped the bestseller charts, Douglas R. Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid is still something of a marvel. Besides being a profound and entertaining meditation on human thought and creativity, this book looks at the surprising points of contact between the music of Bach, the artwork of Escher, and the mathematics of Gödel. It also looks at the prospects for computers and artificial intelligence (AI) for mimicking human thought. For the general reader and the computer techie alike, this book still sets a standard for thinking about the future of computers and their relation to the way we think.
Hofstadter's great achievement in Gödel, Escher, Bach was making abstruse mathematical topics (like undecidability, recursion, and 'strange loops') accessible and remarkably entertaining. Borrowing a page from Lewis Carroll (who might well have been a fan of this book), each chapter presents dialogue between the Tortoise and Achilles, as well as other characters who dramatize concepts discussed later in more detail. Allusions to Bach's music (centering on his Musical Offering) and Escher's continually paradoxical artwork are plentiful here. This more approachable material lets the author delve into serious number theory (concentrating on the ramifications of Gödel's Theorem of Incompleteness) while stopping along the way to ponder the work of a host of other mathematicians, artists, and thinkers.
The world has moved on since 1979, of course. The book predicted that computers probably won't ever beat humans in chess, though Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov in 1997. And the vinyl record, which serves for some of Hofstadter's best analogies, is now left to collectors. Sections on recursion and the graphs of certain functions from physics look tantalizing, like the fractals of recent chaos theory. And AI has moved on, of course, with mixed results. Yet Gödel, Escher, Bach remains a remarkable achievement. Its intellectual range and ability to let us visualize difficult mathematical concepts help make it one of this century's best for anyone who's interested in computers and their potential for real intelligence."

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Of course this book has been posted here numerous times already, but every single copy has been based on a set of deeply flawed OCRed DOC files floating around the internet... it has still never been commercially released as an eBook as far as I can tell. As I could find nothing but these anywhere, I resolved to completely clean them up. It took several months (I can understand why no one else wanted to: it's a typesetter's and a proofreader's nightmare!) but this book is a classic and a masterpiece and sorely needed someone to treat it as such.

Some of the changes:

* Added the Twentieth-Anniversary preface by the author from the 1999 edition (this is the only change from the original; this copy is now completely up-to-date)
* Proofread (twice) and read against the original text, fixing thousands of OCR errors, typos, and entire missing words (even a few entire missing sentences)
* Ran a complete (I hope) spellcheck and caught a few dozen errors I'd missed, and a few of the author's own spelling errors in the original book
* Corrected the symbols so that the equations actually work and aren't meaningless gibberish anymore
* Corrected the fonts, using Quadrata meanginfully as the original book does (rather than bold Times) and restoring missing italics, small caps and other formatting
* Cleaned up dozens of illustrations fixing contrast, eliminating bleed-through of backing pages, removing dirt and correcting rotation and skew
* Rescanned several images that had parts cropped out or otherwise needed replacing
* Added a nice cover page with a cleaned-up scan

And just so I don't go patting myself on the back excessively, here are some things I didn't do:

* I missed rescanning Figure 19 on page 117 which is slightly clipped on left and rotated; I don't even have the original book anymore. Maybe next time.
* I didn't correct the repaginated page numbers in the index and the list of illustrations, as who cares: we have Find! The Table of Contents' page numbers should be accurate, however.
* I didn't save it as an EPUB or anything else... there's only a PDF as I find it a pain to convert to other filetypes and PDF keeps all the formatting so well... sorry. Feel free of course!

Please feel free to post any remaining mistakes you may find here. If I get enough of them, I may re-release with corrections. Or, if you just want to say thanks, please feel free as it would be nice to know that the work I put in was appreciated. It took several months of my free time!

Released! I Can Even Relax. Consume, Avid Readers!