erkapilmehta/co.py.cat

Hofstadter's copycat, more pythonically

co.py.cat

An implementation of Douglas Hofstadter's copycat algorithm. The copycat algorithm is explained on Wikipedia, and that page has many links for deeper reading.

This implementation is a copycat of Scott Boland's Java implementation, but re-written into Python. It's not a direct translation - but based on his code. I did not carry over the GUI, as this version can more usefully be run from command line, or imported for use by other Python scripts.

In cases where I could not grok the Java implementation easily I took ideas from the LISP implementation, or directly from Melanie Mitchell's "Analogy-Making as Perception"

I also tried to make the code more pythonic.

Installation

There are no particular installation instructions, just clone and run, e.g.

$ git clone https://github.com/jalanb/co.py.cat.git
$ cd co.py.cat/copycat
$ python main.py abc abd ijk

Running

The script takes three arguments. The first two are a pair of triplets with some change, for example "abc" and "abd". The third is a triplet which the script should try to change analogously

For example the following invocation will probably display "ijl"

$ python main.py abc abd ijk

Badges

See Also

1. "The Copycat Project: An Experiment in Nondeterminism and Creative Analogies" by Hofstadter, Douglas
2. "Analogy-Making as Perception" by Mitchell, Melanie
3. Arthur O'Dwyer (Quuxplusone on GitHub) has further cleaned and extended this code in a fork available here.