Hofstadter's law is a
self-referential
Self-reference occurs in natural or formal languages when a sentence, idea or formula refers to itself. The reference may be expressed either directly—through some intermediate sentence or formula—or by means of some encoding. In philoso ...
adage
An adage (; Latin: adagium) is a memorable and usually philosophical aphorism that communicates an important truth derived from experience, custom, or both, and that many people consider true and credible because of its longeval tradition, i ...
, coined by
Douglas Hofstadter
Douglas Richard Hofstadter (born February 15, 1945) is an American scholar of cognitive science, physics, and comparative literature whose research includes concepts such as the sense of self in relation to the external world, consciousness, a ...
in his book ''
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid'' (1979) to describe the widely experienced difficulty of accurately estimating the time it will take to complete tasks of substantial
complexity
Complexity characterises the behaviour of a system or model whose components interact in multiple ways and follow local rules, leading to nonlinearity, randomness, collective dynamics, hierarchy, and emergence.
The term is generally used to ch ...
:
[''Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid''. 20th anniversary ed., 1999, p. 152. .]
The law is often cited by
programmer
A computer programmer, sometimes referred to as a software developer, a software engineer, a programmer or a coder, is a person who creates computer programs — often for larger computer software.
A programmer is someone who writes/creates ...
s in discussions of techniques to improve productivity, such as ''
The Mythical Man-Month
''The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering'' is a book on software engineering and project management by Fred Brooks first published in 1975, with subsequent editions in 1982 and 1995. Its central theme is that adding manpower to a ...
'' or
extreme programming
Extreme programming (XP) is a software development methodology intended to improve software quality and responsiveness to changing customer requirements. As a type of agile software development,"Human Centred Technology Workshop 2006 ", 2006, P ...
.
History
In 1979, Hofstadter introduced the law in connection with a discussion of
chess-playing computers, which at the time were continually being beaten by
top-level human players, despite outpacing humans in depth of
analysis
Analysis ( : analyses) is the process of breaking a complex topic or substance into smaller parts in order to gain a better understanding of it. The technique has been applied in the study of mathematics and logic since before Aristotle (3 ...
. Hofstadter wrote:
In 1997, the chess computer
Deep Blue became the first to beat a human champion by
defeating Garry Kasparov.
See also
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References
{{Douglas Hofstadter
Adages
Self-reference
Paremiology