I wrote, in response to Prof. de Rezende: > Yes, all very lovely, I've read Douglas Hofstadter's books too. ...
This was a cheap shot, and I'm ashamed to re-read it. I didn't mean by this that Prof. de Rezende was not right to ground the "algorithms are mathematics" perspective in the primary literature of computer science, or even that it isn't more correct in a theory-of-knowledge sense than other perspectives. It's just that I don't think this calculus is helpful when interpreting a patent statute, because that formal relationship is neither what the legislators had in mind nor representative of the economics of the field. In any case, Pedro didn't get those ideas secondhand from Douglas Hofstadter, nor would they be any less valid if he had (I rather enjoyed Hofstadter's books myself and appreciate his popularization of topics that would perhaps otherwise be much less widely discussed outside academia). It really wasn't nice of me to dismiss Pedro's comments in those terms, and I apologize and ask his pardon. Cheers, - Michael