Copycat is a program designed by Hofstadter that through analogy mimics actions made by the user. This can be a little hard to explain so I will give an example; the exact same example Hofstadter used in his book to design his program.

Suppose the letter-string abc were changed to abd; It would then be reasonable to hand Copycat the letter-string ijk and ask if to change it in the same way. Copycat may produce the string ijl, seeing as the first string’s change was to replace the third element with it’s successor.

Hofstadter goes on, continuing his discussion of what Copycat is and does. However, what struck me as interesting was how he related Copycat to creative human thinkers. Creativity is an illusive concept, one that, for me anyway, seems to be a greater challenge to map to a computer system than most other every-day human thought processes.

Something about creativity speaks out to me as one of human-kinds greatest abilities. Elizabeth Gilbert does it a great justice in the following video. She notes the close connection between creativity and genius, how creativity can easily escape us, and how we can easily get upset about how carelessly and capriciously our creativity can come and go. I find it is a struggle to be continuously creative; at times there is very little we can do to get the creativity flowing, yet sometimes, out of nowhere, amazing concepts have a way of popping into our heads. This is what Copycat does. It make analogies about a given scenario (albeit a small micro-domain), but it doesn’t have to worry about running out of creativity. Does this mean that Copycat is a genius?