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An Interview with Douglas R. Hofstadter, following ''I am a Strange Loop''
Douglas R. Hofstadter is best-known for his book Gödel, Escher, Bach ( GEB for short). In his latest book, I am a Strange Loop , he visits once again many of the themes originally presented in that book. The interview below was conducted in September 2007 and was originally published, in Hebrew, in the online culture magazine Haayal Hakore .
In 1986 I made a computer model of coordinated animal motion such as bird flocks and fish schools. It was based on three dimensional computational geometry of the sort normally used in computer animation or computer aided design. I called the generic simulated flocking creatures boids . The basic flocking model consists of three simple steering behaviors which describe how an individual boid maneuvers based on the positions and velocities its nearby flockmates: Each boid has direct access to the whole scene's geometric description, but flocking requires that it reacts only to flockmates within a certain small neighborhood around itself.
Boids