rb@ccird1.UUCP (Rex Ballard) (05/12/86)
In article <2142@peora.UUCP> jer@peora.UUCP (J. Eric Roskos) writes: > >> The chemist Kekule several times described his 1857 discovery of the >> structure of benzene as having come to him in a a vision, while gazing at >> a fire. (Benzene is a ring; he "saw" the ancient alchemical symbol of the >> ourobouros, a snake swallowing its tail.) Recently, John Wotiz, a >> chemistry professor at Southern Illinois University, has ridiculed the >> idea that this is the way it happened, claiming that it Kekule derived the >> structure by "hard work" instead of mysical insight. > >Actually, Kekule's description would seem to me to be in keeping with >these spatial or "dimensional" models of memory -- thinking of the snake >swallowing its tail might have essentially created a "guess" (in terms of >the image of the ring) sufficiently close to the information he had >collected in his mind on benzene that the guess then gravitated towards >the "correct" structure for benzene in the way the model describes (recall >that it says that if you make a guess sufficiently close to a memorized >item, then the memorized item will draw your guess to it -- furthermore >the models from cognitive psychology say that if you give a person a piece >of information that is related in nonobvious ways to other things they >already know of, they will tend to "discover" the nonobvious relations >eventhough there is no evident, rational reason for their doing so). >-- >E. Roskos The illustration of Kekule tapping his subconcious triggered an old idea I've often mused about. On of the interesting characteristics of the human mind is it's ability to "browse" through the subconcious. If you wish, imagine the subconcious as a series of sequential files, which contain little, if any "indexing" or logical "organization". Many inventors and creative people simply "stuff their minds" with a seemingly random set of facts generally focused on a particular area of expertise. Once this information is "Ingested", it must be "Digested" through a near trance-like state. Often the "brilliant flash" (I've heard the term 'blick') of an idea comes just as one is about to fall asleep. Now, to attempt to apply the same technology to computer archetecture, perhaps we could schedule low priority processes which, during periods of low activity on the machine, would simply "browse" it's own file system, other computers, whatever it could get access to, and attempt to organize it into a collection of facts, noting where and how it found it's information. The result: On monday, you could ask the computer if it knew anything about "Kekule", and it might know nothing. On tuesday, the same computer, would not only be able to list all of the references in this, or any other article, but could give you a brief summary of what he had done (Determined the structure of benzene). In effect, the computer would gradually organize information on all forms of knowledge. Often re-scanning when it is asked questions about a subject which it has not incorporated into its "organization". Among the other items in it's "subconcious" would be the rules for building other rules. Adding N rules might result in N*F additional new rules and N*F*F new facts. Since the intent here is to orgainize massive quantities of information, the storage media would not necessarily have to be fast, just capable of storing lots of information. Perhaps something like a VCR helical head type of drive. In addition, different processors could specialize in different sorts of information, and also serve as preprocessors to other processors. For example, a processor which was soley "interested" in parsing english syntax could pass what it parsed to other processors. In addition, it might try to find "definitions" of new words which it does not understand. Perhaps another processor could "read" microfilm, turning bitmaps into parsable text. Imagine, for example a "yellow pages ad" which shows a list of trademarks. These could be "recognized" and the "parser" would convert these to facts like sells(computerland,computers) brands(computerland,"American Telephone and Telegraph") simply by seeing the "death star" :-) trademark. Has anybody tried experimenting with such an approach? Has anyone tried writing a computer program which can "parse" Webster's Dictionary, then correctly parse any English sentence? I have seen trivial versions of this in prolog, but nothing that could parse this entire article.