Hofstadter's law

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]

History

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]

See also

• Law of Accelerating Returns – Perceived increase in the rate of technological change throughout historyPages displaying short descriptions of redirect targets
• 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 durationPages displaying wikidata descriptions as a fallback