He was free to think about whatever he wanted he chose to think about thinking itself. Each night he pitched his tent somewhere new (“sometimes in a forest, sometimes by a lake”) and read by flashlight. Discouraged by the way his doctoral thesis was going at the University of Oregon, feeling “profoundly lost,” he decided in the summer of 1972 to pack his things into a car he called Quicksilver and drive eastward across the continent. T he idea that changed Hofstadter’s existence, as he has explained over the years, came to him on the road, on a break from graduate school in particle physics.

So if the endeavor succeeds, it will be a double victory: we will finally come to know the exact mechanics of our selves-and we’ll have made intelligent machines. Computers are flexible enough to model the strange evolved convolutions of our thought, and yet responsive only to precise instructions. Their operating premise is simple: the mind is a very unusual piece of software, and the best way to understand how a piece of software works is to write it yourself. For the past 30 years, most of them spent in an old house just northwest of the Indiana University campus, he and his graduate students have been picking up the slack: trying to figure out how our thinking works, by writing computer programs that think. Hofstadter says this with an easy deliberateness, and he says it that way because for him, it is an uncontroversial conviction that the most-exciting projects in modern artificial intelligence, the stuff the public maybe sees as stepping stones on the way to science fiction-like Watson, IBM’s Jeopardy-playing supercomputer, or Siri, Apple’s iPhone assistant-in fact have very little to do with intelligence. “If somebody meant by artificial intelligence the attempt to understand the mind, or to create something human-like, they might say-maybe they wouldn’t go this far-but they might say this is some of the only good work that’s ever been done.”

“It depends on what you mean by artificial intelligence.” Douglas Hofstadter is in a grocery store in Bloomington, Indiana, picking out salad ingredients.

Douglas richard hofstadter