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Hofstadter's law is a self-referential adage, coined by Douglas Hofstadter in his book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1979) to describe the widely experienced difficulty of accurately estimating the time it will take to complete tasks of substantial complexity:[1][2]
Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.[2]
The law is often cited by programmers in discussions of techniques to improve productivity, such as The Mythical Man-Month or extreme programming.[3]
In 1979, Hofstadter introduced the law in connection with a discussion of chess-playing computers, which at the time were continually being beaten by top-level human players, despite outpacing humans in depth of analysis. Hofstadter wrote:
In the early days of computer chess, people used to estimate that it would be ten years until a computer (or program) was world champion. But after ten years had passed, it seemed that the day a computer would become world champion was still more than ten years away... This is just one more piece of evidence for the rather recursive Hofstadter's Law.[4][5][6][7]
In 1997, the chess computer Deep Blue became the first to beat a human champion by defeating Garry Kasparov.[8]
- Law of Accelerating Returns – Perceived increase in the rate of technological change throughout history
- Lindy effect – Theorized increase of longevity with age
- List of eponymous laws – Adages and sayings named after a person
- Ninety–ninety rule – Humorous aphorism in computer programming
- Optimism bias – Type of cognitive bias
- Parkinson's law – Adage that work expands to fill its available time
- Planning fallacy – Cognitive bias of underestimating time needed
- Reference class forecasting – Method of predicting the future
- Student syndrome – Planned procrastination
- Valve Time – Discrepancy between promised and actual release date
- Vierordt's law – law of time perception relating perceived duration to actual duration
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