Doug is fuming angry (preface 4)

Hofstadter starts by recalling a news article which appeared in Science. The article praised a recently developed program based on "structure-mapping theory" (SME). Supposedly, it could 'understand' concepts and make analogies between these concepts -- such as heat movement and water movement. Sadly, it was all really just clever programming on the part of the researchers, and the program really didn't know what it was doing. It's job was just to manipulate symbols in a pre-defined manner.

Next, there is discussion about an article in the New York Times in 1993, which describes a program which can write novels by asking questions to the host of the machine (a person). It was hailed by many as a great marvel of the modern age.. a computer .. that thought up stories! But it really wasn't understanding anything, as the article said. Doug was frustrated and angry at these statements -- he even wrote a letter to the NYT.

The final portion of the preface talks about the COPYCAT project. Hofstadter says he and his team would love to talk all day about COPYCAT, but he realizes that any researcher loves to go on and on about their studies.. I guess they might've felt a bit ashamed at their little program, when so many others were making headlines. But, it looks like there's still a few hundred more pages to go, so I bet something interesting is around the next corner.