Hofstadter wrote about this in a column for Scientific American. The article appears in his collection, "Metamagical Themas," and Google Books has most of it here: http://books.google.com/books?id=o8jzWF7rD6oC&dq=metamag....
I published Nomic in 1982, about seven years before my sabbatical in Hofstadter's lab. But I published it in Hofstadter's column in Scientific American. We got to know one another through Nomic, and it led to the sabbatical at his lab, not the other way around.
There's nothing confidential in this; please feel free to post it if you think it would interest others.