Stories by Douglas R. Hofstadter

Parquet deformations: patterns of tiles that shift gradually in one dimension

The calculus of cooperation is tested through a lottery

Computer tournaments of the Prisoner's Dilemma suggest how cooperation evolves

In which a discourse on the language Lisp concludes with a gargantuan Italian feast

Tripping the light recursive in Lisp, the language of artificial intelligence

The pleasures of Lisp: the chosen language of artificial intelligence

Virus-like sentences and self-replicating structures

Sense makes more sense than nonsense, but nonsense may still have its purposes

"Default assumptions" and their effects on writing and thinking

Variations on a theme as the essence of imagination

Can be inspiration be mechanised?

Undercut, Flaunt, Hruska, behavioral evolution and other games of strategy

Beyond Rubik's Cube: spheres, pyramids, dodecahedrons and God knows what else

About Nomic: a heroic game that explores the reflexivity of the law

Number numbness, or why innumeracy may be just as dangerous as illiteracy

The music of Frédéric Chopin: startling aural patterns that also startle the eye

Is the genetic code an arbitrary one, or would another code work as well?

About two kinds of inquiry: "National Enquirer" and "The Skeptical Inquirer"

A self-referential column about last January's column about self-reference

Strange attractors: mathematical patterns delicately poised between order and chaos

How might analogy, the core of human thinking, be understood by computers?

Pitfalls of the uncertainty principle and paradoxes of quantum mechanics

A coffeehouse conversation on the Turing test to determine if a machine can think

The Magic Cube's cubies are twiddled by cubists and solved by cubemeisters