MIT OpenCourseWare: Godel, Escher, Bach: A Mental Space Odyssey | Hacker News Reader

MIT OpenCourseWare: Godel, Escher, Bach: A Mental Space Odyssey

ocw.mit.edu

33 pointsAnon849 comments

Leave it up to MIT to combine Cellular Automata, CFGs and Gödel, but then also:

  Special software is required to use some of the files in this section: .rm.

VLC player handles it nicely.

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

Sadly, seems not so on my Kubuntu box.

oh god, is that realmedia? i haven't seen one of those extensions since the 90's.

Buffering...

Maybe now I can understand this book. It arrived last week, and I cracked it to find to my surprise that its genius level material. I would have to have a lot of uninterrupted time to grok.

I've handed my copy to a few people now, some found it intimidating it first but I don't think it's genius level material. Just take it a page at a time and keep in mind that it'll be worth it.

Oh yeah - and if you're struggling with the math/meta-math examples you should do what he says and play around with the ideas with pen and paper. If I remember correctly they're mostly closer to the start of the book so after that you should be fine.

According to the web page this video was recorded for teaching high school students. That might make it an easier introduction.

This is old news:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=436299

Reply on news.ycombinator.com