Thanks for the up-vote. My point is that it's easy to fool an amateur. But classical music, which is what Hofstadter thinks he understands/knows, is often beyond the realm of the amateur. It's not that an amateur can't love classical music, but to understand why a piece of music is great when another similar one isn't is often a rather complicated question.

I think my point would be illustrated by this experiment, similar to his original experiment. Take a piece by Chopin, and a piece by a contemporaneous unknown composer. No doubt to the amateur, they would sound like they could have been written by the same person. Add in the piece by EMI and an amateur would not be able to tell which one was which. The reality is that in order to really understand great music, you need to know a lot more than Hofstadter does. I am confident that I could play him 10 pieces written in Poland in 1835 and he would think they were all by Chopin, even if all of them were utter crap.

Human musicians and composers can riff off a single rhythm or melody and produce something wonderful the very first time. Engineers can visualize a solution, implement it, and have it basically work, with only surface elements changing. Artists can have a vision of what they want to achieve in their minds and cast it out, bit by bit, ever remaining the work they intended it. Sure, each incorporate many patterns already learned and practiced and processed. But computers are a long, long way from even doing that. This is a very different type of creativity.