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 to describe the widely experienced difficulty of accurately estimating the time it will take to complete tasks of substantial complexity:
The law is often cited by programmers in discussions of techniques to improve productivity, such as The Mythical Man-Month or extreme programming.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 recursive analysis. Conventional wisdom held that the strength of human players lay in their ability to focus on particular positions rather than follow every possible line of play to its ultimate conclusion. Hofstadter wrote:
In 1997, the chess computer Deep Blue became the first to beat a human champion by defeating Garry Kasparov.
