Hofstadter's law
Encyclopedia
Hofstadter's law is a self-referencing
time-related adage
, coined by Douglas Hofstadter
and named after himself.
Hofstadter's Law was a part of Douglas Hofstadter's 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
. The law is a statement regarding the difficulty of accurately estimating the time it will take to complete tasks of any substantial complexity. It is often cited amongst programmer
s, especially in discussions of techniques to improve productivity, such as The Mythical Man-Month
or extreme programming
. The recursive nature of the law is a reflection of the universal experience of difficulty experienced in estimating complex tasks despite all best efforts, including knowing that the task is complex.
The law was initially introduced in connection with a discussion of chess playing computers, where as top-level players were continuously beating machines, even though the machines outweighed the players in recursive analysis. The intuition was that the players were able to focus on particular positions instead of following every possible line of play to its conclusion. Hofstadter wrote:
“In the early days of computer chess, people used to estimate that it would be ten years until a computer (or program) was world champion. But after ten years had passed, it seemed that the day a computer would become world champion was still more than ten years away”. He then suggests that this was “just one more piece of evidence for the rather recursive Hofstadter’s Law.”
Self-reference
Self-reference occurs in natural or formal languages when a sentence or formula refers to itself. The reference may be expressed either directly—through some intermediate sentence or formula—or by means of some encoding...
time-related adage
Adage
An adage is a short but memorable saying which holds some important fact of experience that is considered true by many people, or that has gained some credibility through its long use....
, coined by Douglas Hofstadter
Douglas Hofstadter
Douglas Richard Hofstadter is an American academic whose research focuses on consciousness, analogy-making, artistic creation, literary translation, and discovery in mathematics and physics...
and named after himself.
Hofstadter's Law was a part of Douglas Hofstadter's 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
Gödel, Escher, Bach
Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid is a book by Douglas Hofstadter, described by his publishing company as "a metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll"....
. The law is a statement regarding the difficulty of accurately estimating the time it will take to complete tasks of any substantial complexity. It is often cited amongst programmer
Programmer
A programmer, computer programmer or coder is someone who writes computer software. The term computer programmer can refer to a specialist in one area of computer programming or to a generalist who writes code for many kinds of software. One who practices or professes a formal approach to...
s, especially in discussions of techniques to improve productivity, such as The Mythical Man-Month
The Mythical Man-Month
The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering is a book on software engineering and project management by Fred Brooks, whose central theme is that "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later"...
or extreme programming
Extreme Programming
Extreme programming is a software development methodology which is intended to improve software quality and responsiveness to changing customer requirements...
. The recursive nature of the law is a reflection of the universal experience of difficulty experienced in estimating complex tasks despite all best efforts, including knowing that the task is complex.
The law was initially introduced in connection with a discussion of chess playing computers, where as top-level players were continuously beating machines, even though the machines outweighed the players in recursive analysis. The intuition was that the players were able to focus on particular positions instead of following every possible line of play to its conclusion. Hofstadter wrote:
“In the early days of computer chess, people used to estimate that it would be ten years until a computer (or program) was world champion. But after ten years had passed, it seemed that the day a computer would become world champion was still more than ten years away”. He then suggests that this was “just one more piece of evidence for the rather recursive Hofstadter’s Law.”
See also
- List of eponymous laws
- Optimism biasOptimism biasOptimism bias is the demonstrated systematic tendency for people to be overly optimistic about the outcome of planned actions. This includes over-estimating the likelihood of positive events and under-estimating the likelihood of negative events. Along with the illusion of control and illusory...
- Parkinson's LawParkinson's lawParkinson's law is the adage first articulated by Cyril Northcote Parkinson as the first sentence of a humorous essay published in The Economist in 1955:...
- Planning fallacyPlanning fallacyThe planning fallacy is a tendency for people and organizations to underestimate how long they will need to complete a task, even when they have experience of similar tasks over-running. The term was first proposed in a 1979 paper by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky...
- Reference class forecastingReference class forecastingReference class forecasting is the method of predicting the future, through looking at similar past situations and their outcomes.Reference class forcasting predicts the outcome of a planned action based on actual outcomes in a reference class of similar actions to that being forecast. The theories...