Godel, Escher, Bach

I read Godel, Escher, Bach  at the recommendation of one of my friends.  It is quite the massive tome and so it was with some trepidation that I picked it out of my stack of books-to-read.  I am not sure I have read a longer non-fiction book in my life.  Certainly not one that wasn't about history.  But then, that isn't fair to GEB (as it is commonly abbreviated), it is about history, and math, and biology, and computer science, and linguistics, and neurology.  And those are just the subjects that it talks about for a chapter or more; it touches on many more topics briefly throughout its sojourns through the world's knowledge in its quest to reach its thesis.

What is its thesis, you might ask?  Well, there are a lot of sub-theses.  Each chapter could be a research paper in and of itself.  There is a lot of talk about how self-referential systems (like humans) have many interesting qualities and potential problems. However, what the book is building towards is that true AI, an actual intelligence that is as intelligent as a human, will have to work very similarly to how the human brain works.

Every chapter starts with a dialogue between the tortoise and Achilles; the pair made famous by Zeno's paradox.  The discussions are generally the introductions to the ideas in the following chapter and it makes it so there are easier to read breaks between the relatively dense discussions of whatever the chapters discuss.

The title referring to three seeming unrelated people is just the beginning of the vast majority of topics this book covers.  All three of them are related to various chapter theses and their fundamental differences and similarities also underlie the whole work.  The amount of work that goes into even one chapter of this book is simply impressive.  I'm sure the more times you read this book, the more you could get out of it.

Overall, I would give this book a 91%.