Melanie Mitchell has a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Michigan, where she studied with the cognitive scientist and writer Douglas Hofstadter; together, they created the Copycat program, which makes creative analogies in an idealized world. The author or editor of several books (such as Complexity: A Guided Tour) and numerous scholarly papers, Mitchell is currently professor of computer science at Portland State University and external professor at the Santa Fe Institute.