Hofstadter's Law

Douglas Hofstadter introduced the law in his 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1980. He formulated it during a discussion of chess-playing computers, noting that despite decades of predictions, machines remained perpetually "ten years away" from beating human champions. The self-referential law captures the recursive difficulty of estimating completion time for complex tasks, embodying the same playful logic that pervades the book.