william@hitl.vrnet.washington.edu (William Bricken) (07/25/90)
In reference to the nature of SPACE:
The mathematical theory of measurement provides a concise summary ofthe
generic types of spaces. Here they are, with slight elaboration.
This list is a hierarchy, each following type is an elaboration of the
preceeding ones. Note that each can be conceptualized as one-dimensional,
additional dimensions (2D, 3D, etc) are merely orthogonal products of
more than one space.
For grounding, it is commonly assumed that our everyday living space is
composed of three REAL spaces at right angles. In fact, this idea was
made up in the middle of the sixteenth century by Descartes. Cyberspace
illustrates the notion that space is quite arbitrary, it provides an
opportunity to retrain ourselves to perceive all the other types of space.
TIME is just another space, one that we have forgotten how to travel freely
in. So is SCALE. The technical challenge of cyberspace is how we will be
able to *mix* types of space in the same perceptual environment.
***THE VARIETIES OF SPACE***
INDICATIVE: the elementary domain of perception. Where our mind is.
This one is not taught in school. See Spencer-Brown, Laws of Form.
NOMINAL: a set, unordered collections of things. EG: the space of
cyberspace novels, of fish in a pond, of items on a menu.
ORDINAL: ordered, ranked things. EG: your list of most to least
favorite novels, pecking orders of fish, steps in an instruction.
INTERVAL: order in which the distance between items is equal. Integers.
EG: pages in a novel, age in days of fish, cells on graph paper.
RATIONAL: intervals which support ratios. Numerical fractions. EG:
percentages of each letter in a novel, portions of a meal each fish eats,
comparison of monetary wealth.
REAL: continuous space. Real numbers. EG: our model of the space
underlying words on a page, the weight and length of fish, physical
space.
IMAGINARY: contradictory spaces. Sqrt[-1]. Both True and False. EG:
our construction of mental images from words, wave propagation, inside a
black hole.
Note how going down this hierarchy successively adds more mathematics and
less physical reality. Note how cognitive spaces bound both the top and the
bottom.
William Bricken
HITL, UW
william@hitl.vrnet.washington.eduphys2094@waikato.ac.nz (07/31/90)
In article <9007250107.AA01311@hitl.vrnet.washington.edu>, william@hitl.vrnet.washington.edu (William Bricken) writes: > In reference to the nature of SPACE: > > The mathematical theory of measurement provides a concise summary ofthe > generic types of spaces. _Mathematical theory_ is introduced here to impress readers with the validity of the following conjectures. Beware! > Here they are, with slight elaboration. > This list is a hierarchy, each following type is an elaboration of the > preceeding ones. Note that each can be conceptualized as one-dimensional, > additional dimensions (2D, 3D, etc) are merely orthogonal products of > more than one space. Note that the topology of each one-dimensional space is expected to be homeomorphic to the real number line to match our concept of spatial dimension. > For grounding, it is commonly assumed that our everyday living space is > composed of three REAL spaces at right angles. In fact, this idea was > made up in the middle of the sixteenth century by Descartes. Cyberspace I'm afraid that I don't know what this _Cyberspace_ concept is, but I am probably in a minority in this newsgroup. > illustrates the notion that space is quite arbitrary, it provides an > opportunity to retrain ourselves to perceive all the other types of space. Is this perception sensual? What do you mean by perceive? > TIME is just another space, one that we have forgotten how to travel freely > in. Did we ever know how to travel freely in space? As children? Did our ancestors know how? Are you aware of the literature on the arrow of time (Stephen Hawking is a good author to refer to)? What happens to causality arguments (grandfather paradox, etc) if we travel in time? >So is SCALE. Is this some vague, quasi-impressive reference to scale-invariance which is used to refer to the scale-invariance of fractals? If so, be careful how you use the term dimension and check the difference between Hausdorff and topological dimension. >The technical challenge of cyberspace is how we will be > able to *mix* types of space in the same perceptual environment. Certainly is a challenge! > ***THE VARIETIES OF SPACE*** > > INDICATIVE: the elementary domain of perception. Where our mind is. > This one is not taught in school. See Spencer-Brown, Laws of Form. _________________________________ I can see why! How is this dimension homeomorphic to the real number line? > NOMINAL: a set, unordered collections of things. EG: the space of > cyberspace novels, of fish in a pond, of items on a menu. Have you ever studied set theory? You have just introduced a set which is bare of any operations? How this can be misconstrued as a _variety of space_ is beyond me! > ORDINAL: ordered, ranked things. EG: your list of most to least > favorite novels, pecking orders of fish, steps in an instruction. Congratulations, you have discovered ordering! > INTERVAL: order in which the distance between items is equal. Integers. > EG: pages in a novel, age in days of fish, cells on graph paper. Gosh, now you are beginning to _perceive_ what a metric is! > RATIONAL: intervals which support ratios. Numerical fractions. EG: > percentages of each letter in a novel, portions of a meal each fish eats, > comparison of monetary wealth. > > REAL: continuous space. Real numbers. EG: our model of the space > underlying words on a page, the weight and length of fish, physical > space. Finally a space that I can associate with my common-sense feel for dimension! > IMAGINARY: contradictory spaces. Sqrt[-1]. Both True and False. EG: > our construction of mental images from words, wave propagation, inside a > black hole. What drivel! Real and imaginary spaces are equivalent. They fuse together to form a plane with the complex product operation defined on it. Whereas multiplication in the real numbers allows contraction and expansion, multipli- cation in complex spaces allows contraction, expansion and rotations. That's it! Where do you get this idea of _contradictory spaces_? What is contradic- tory about _wave propagation_? What is so strange about the construction of mental images for which words are just labels? And the apparent contradic- tions about black holes are merely a consequence of the presence of a singu- larity in the equations which indicates a limit of the theory of general relativity. > Note how going down this hierarchy successively adds more mathematics and You mean self-delusion and confusion > less physical reality. Note how cognitive spaces bound both the top and the > bottom. Does anyone take this guy seriously? Is he just trying to justify some science-fiction genre, or is he trying to sell an attitude? > William Bricken > HITL, UW What is HITL and how do I avoid it? > william@hitl.vrnet.washington.edu Do me a favour. Enjoy your science fiction, but don't insert deluded crap into a science newsgroup. BTW, this criticism is not meant to be personal. Have a nice day. :)
hitlab@milton.u.washington.edu (Human Interface Tech. Lab) (08/02/90)
In article <1120.26b55980@waikato.ac.nz>, phys2094@waikato.ac.nz writes: > > In article <9007250107.AA01311@hitl.vrnet.washington.edu>, > william@hitl.vrnet.washington.edu (William Bricken) writes: > > > > For grounding, it is commonly assumed that our everyday living space is > > composed of three REAL spaces at right angles. In fact, this idea was > > made up in the middle of the sixteenth century by Descartes. Cyberspace > > > I'm afraid that I don't know what this _Cyberspace_ concept is, but I am > probably in a minority in this newsgroup. That is obvious. - Steve = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = . | Steve Aukstakalnis Voice: (206) 543-5075 \ : Human Interface Tech. Laboratory Fax: (206) 543-5380 \*----------------------------------------------------------------- (> \ Washington Technology Centers hitlab@milton.u.washington.edu Univ. of Washington, Seattle steve@hitl.VRnet.washington.edu = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
maddox@blake.acs.washington.edu (Tom Maddox) (08/03/90)
In article <1120.26b55980@waikato.ac.nz> phys2094@waikato.ac.nz writes: > >Do me a favour. Enjoy your science fiction, but don't insert deluded crap >into a science newsgroup. Do me a favor. Don't equate science fiction with deluded crap. Fiction is fiction, not delusion. -- Tom Maddox "Satanic Verses is a despicable book that could not have been written by a person who wished to behave decently and responsibly." Orson Scott Card
wex@dali.pws.bull.com (Buckaroo Banzai) (08/06/90)
Several people have written to me over the past week or two asking about the idea(s) of semantic dimensions which I've been talking about in this group. This is very flattering, but people always want more info. The only things I've written on this so far are the abstract for the cyberspace conference and the chapter in the book. So here is an I-hope-not-too-long synopsis of the ideas of semantic spaces. First some background: I came to the cyberspace party from the field of software engineering, particularly large-scale software engineering. This led me to have an interest in the visualization, manipulation, and navigation of large amounts of abstract information. Y'see, when you're building VRs for architects or pilots or whoever, you're mostly dealing with data that has a natural spatial (usually 3D) arrangement built into it. Gibson more or less realized this problem when he talked about cyberspace in NEUROMANCER, but he avoided the problem by having the data pyramids correspond to the physical locations of the owning companies. Xerox's rooms implementation also danced around this issue by mapping abstract concepts (computer tools and utilities) onto well-known 3D-spatial concepts (rooms). The problem is that this kind of thing rapidly breaks down in the world of large-scale software engineering. When you have system that's composed of hundreds of source modules, millions of code lines, thousands of test programs, tens of thousands of bug reports and fixes and enhancements (not to mention the mountain of documentation, design, and specification that came before and along with the code) - well, you can see the problem. A number of existing systems try to deal with this by imposing their own order on the information. You put all the data into one central repository, described all in the same way, and look at it only through their tools -- and it more or less works. Of course, if you have some new kind of information that doesn't fit the precanned schemas you're more or less screwed, but that's life, right? This is just the visualization problem. The manipulation and navigation problems are as large or larger, but let's deal with things one at a time. My experience shows that setting up a good visualization structure can suggest interaction means that were not thought of beforehand. So I set out to come up with a theory that would be broad enough to encompass all kinds of abstract (and concrete) data and that would provide general, powerful, and flexible means for visualizing whatever information the user would want. Now it struck me that, in a way, the ordinary spatial layouts we experience are a derivative of the properties of the objects that make them up. Walls are, more or less, vertical flat surfaces. Spheres tend not to be found balanced on the tips of pyramids. And so on. From this, I decided to take the idea of examining the objects of interest and using their properties to determine the space in which they would be visualized. We can map the properties of objects one-to-one onto dimensions of cyberspace. The dimensions reflect some element of meaning (semantics) about the objects; thus, semantic dimensions. An N-dimensional space of these dimensions is a semantic space. I conceive of cyberspace as a semantic space. Because the properties of the objects are (more or less) mathematically describable, we can then say interesting things about the dimensions of cyberspace. For example, there is no reason why cyberspace dimensions have to map (as our experiential three dimensions do) to the real number line - despite the blatherings of a certain idiot in this newsgroup. It would be easy in this framework to have, for example, a quantum dimension which represented the energy states of electrons. In such a dimension objects could occupy only specific points along the dimension, and not be in between. There are lots of issues here, such as: what about ordering? what kinds of dimensions should there be? what about properties that are not confined to a single object, but are the result of object-interaction (such as the property earlier-version-of, an important concept in software engineering). I attempt to address these issues and more in my chapter, but as I am approaching the hundred-line mark, I will stop here and allow anyone interested to ask what more they want to know. -- --Alan Wexelblat phone: (508)294-7485 Bull Worldwide Information Systems internet: wex@pws.bull.com Today is Hiroshima Day. Rest in peace 200,000+ innocents
schraudo%beowulf@ucsd.edu (Nici Schraudolph) (08/07/90)
wex@dali.pws.bull.com (Buckaroo Banzai) writes: >We can map the properties of objects one-to-one onto dimensions of >cyberspace. The dimensions reflect some element of meaning (semantics) >about the objects; thus, semantic dimensions. An N-dimensional space of >these dimensions is a semantic space. I conceive of cyberspace as a >semantic space. Buckaroo's suggestions don't strike me as useful for either visualization, navigation or manipulation of virtual objects: To visualize an object in it you have to somehow embed the semantic space in our plain old 4-D spacetime. The entire cognitive engineering problem resides in the design of this embedding, yet you are very vague about it. Could you tell us specifically what sort of embedding you had in mind? Humans have intuitive navigation abilities only for 2-D spaces, and fare very badly in higher dimensions and alternative geometries. Ever played "wumpus"? It's played on a 3-D dodekaeder, and even though that's a comparatively simple space you usually get lost after a few moves. Humans can navigate complex spaces only with the help of cognitive artifacts (maps, paper & pencil, ...), and using them in VR therefore defeats the whole idea of VR as a user-friendly interface. For object manipulation the data structures used should accommodate the most frequent operations used on the data. A vast sparse product space (which is what Buckaroo suggests) strikes me as the LEAST useful organization of data. Why not use VR implementations of such time-honored computer science data structures as trees, inverted lists, priority queues, and so on? -- Nicol N. Schraudolph, C-014 nici%cs@ucsd.edu University of California, San Diego nici%cs@ucsd.bitnet La Jolla, CA 92093-0114 ...!ucsd!cs!nici
gbnewby@rodan.acs.syr.edu (Gregory B. Newby) (08/07/90)
In <9007250107.AA01311@hitl.vrnet.washington.edu> william@hitl.vrnet.washington.edu (William Bricken) writes: >In reference to the nature of SPACE: (etc. etc.) William: I liked the summary you posted. Could you elaborate on each of the varieties of space, and possibly provide some references? How do concepts like euclidian/non-euclidian space, isomorphic/anisopmorphic space, and metric/non-metric space get fit into your propositions? What philosophical notions of "reality" might be implied here? I see signs of classic positivism in the makings here, complete with an Aristotelian category system (category systems are bad news, as soon as you start to do any categorizing with them). For that matter, what sorts of assumptions about reality are made by we virtual- cyber-spacers? Yes, people can make their own realities: that, we offer them. Are you willing to grant the un-realness of the reality you usually live in, in favor of a virtual one? This is an important question, potentially: If someone is a king of worlds in his/her virtual reality, and not much of anyone in my reality, does this make him/her less of a king? Oh: I could also use a summary of _Laws of Form_, or more elaboration on Indicative space -- this one wasn't clear. I'm concerned that anything is claimed as "elementary" without some more substantiation (and even then, I'm concerned). Keep posting. -- Greg Newby gbnewby@rodan.acs.syr.edu School of Information Studies gbnewby@sunrise.bitnet Syracuse University "Curiouser and curiouser" -Alice
kevino@fs0.ee.ubc.ca (kevin o'donnell) (08/08/90)
In article <schraudo.649982297@beowulf>, schraudo%beowulf@ucsd.edu (Nici Schraudolph) writes: > wex@dali.pws.bull.com (Buckaroo Banzai) writes: > > >We can map the properties of objects one-to-one onto dimensions of > >cyberspace. The dimensions reflect some element of meaning (semantics) > >about the objects; thus, semantic dimensions. An N-dimensional space of > >these dimensions is a semantic space. I conceive of cyberspace as a > >semantic space. > > Buckaroo's suggestions don't strike me as useful for either visualization, > navigation or manipulation of virtual objects: > > To visualize an object in it you have to somehow embed the semantic space in > our plain old 4-D spacetime. The entire cognitive engineering problem resides > in the design of this embedding, yet you are very vague about it. Could you > tell us specifically what sort of embedding you had in mind? > I think what was being suggested is something similar to choosing the axes on a graph. You choose some property (which may not be a spatial concept) or aspect of the data and assign a direction to it. For example, if navigating the database of available computer systems to buy, the horizontal plane could map out the size (for portablility) versus the memory capacity, while the vertical direction could represent benchmarked processing speed and the price range could be represented by colour. Each machine in the database would be represented by an appropriate icon and entering the icon would transport the user into another space with more machine specific information mapped out. This is probably a more limited form of what Alan was thinking of but that's how I interpreted it. Til Later, Kevin ------------------------------------------------------------------------ |"Yes," said Piglet, "Rabbit has Brain." | Kevin O'Donnell | |There was a long silence. | kevino@ee.ubc.ca | |"I suppose," said Pooh, "that`s why he never | U of British Columbia | | understands anything." | Vancouver, Canada | ------------------------------------------------------------------------
sean@unix.cis.pitt.edu (08/08/90)
>Humans have intuitive navigation abilities only for 2-D spaces, and fare very >badly in higher dimensions and alternative geometries. Ever played "wumpus"? >It's played on a 3-D dodekaeder, and even though that's a comparatively simple >space you usually get lost after a few moves. Humans can navigate complex >spaces only with the help of cognitive artifacts (maps, paper & pencil, ...), >and using them in VR therefore defeats the whole idea of VR as a user-friendly >interface. I dunno about this. Sure, I personally have trouble navigating 3D worlds that are described via text only, but I think it might be a good deal easier to handle if graphics are used, especially if we can somehow simulate the effects of motion and orientation on the inner ear. Also, has anyone given thought to treating 'scale' as a dimension of sorts? Sean Owens sean@unix.cis.pitt.edu
wex@dali.pws.bull.com (Buckaroo Banzai) (08/08/90)
In article <schraudo.649982297@beowulf> schraudo%beowulf@ucsd.edu (Nici
Schraudolph) asks some very good questions:
Buckaroo's suggestions don't strike me as useful for either visualization,
a navigation or manipulation of virtual objects:
Well, you're welcome to come up with your own. That's the point of a theory
after all. What I have is a theory and some experience with small-scale
implementations of it. I'm always ready to be proven wrong.
To visualize an object in it you have to somehow embed the semantic space
in our plain old 4-D spacetime. The entire cognitive engineering problem
resides in the design of this embedding, yet you are very vague about it.
Could you tell us specifically what sort of embedding you had in mind?
You're right, I was pretty vague. The mapping is really pretty arbitrary.
What you do is take the three most interesting properties and map them to X,
Y, Z. In doing this, of course, you want to take advantage of peoples'
cognitive skills and expectations. Usually you have things increase left to
right, you try not to clutter the display, etc.
The basic semantic space theory provides for visualization of property
triples. In order to do more than that, you have to move to the automatic-
icons world. This idea is described in a paper I published with Kim
Fairchild and Greg Meredith in Interacting with Computers. It's also
available as an MCC tech report.
Anyway, for those who don't want to track down the report: it's easy to see
that X, Y, Z position are only three of the representational properties one
can use. Size, shape, color, and texture are all obvious. Velocity and
acceleration are less obvious, but usable. With more advanced output
devices, we can also map to flexibility, softness, and so on. In general,
what you're doing is producing a mapping from object space to icon space.
Our paper describes the mathematical foundations for this and gives some
examples from a software reuse system.
Humans have intuitive navigation abilities only for 2-D spaces, and fare
very badly in higher dimensions and alternative geometries. Ever played
"wumpus"? It's played on a 3-D dodekaeder, and even though that's a
comparatively simple space you usually get lost after a few moves.
Humans can navigate complex spaces only with the help of cognitive
artifacts (maps, paper & pencil, ...), and using them in VR therefore
defeats the whole idea of VR as a user-friendly interface.
I disagree on two points. First off, people do pretty well with flight
simulators, so we *can* go to 3D (in fact, we spend most of our waking lives
navigating in 3D). Wumpus is a kind of weird space; not very intuitive.
Second, who says cyberspace should be devoid of cognitive artifacts? I
think there should be lots. Again in a past paper (with Kim Fairchild), we
talk about navigating cyberspace. To do this, we hypothesize the
construction of whole new classes of artifacts to act as navigational aids.
For object manipulation the data structures used should accommodate the
most frequent operations used on the data. A vast sparse product space
(which is what Buckaroo suggests) strikes me as the LEAST useful
organization of data.
You're confusing theory with implementation. One can implement sparse
arrays in a number of compact, useful forms. Why not do the same for
spaces? Remember, the prime purpose of semantic-space theory is to provide
a natural locative system for abstract data.
Why not use VR implementations of such time-honored computer science data
structures as trees, inverted lists, priority queues, and so on?
Don't confuse *presentation* with *representation*. You can look at your
data any way you like. That's like comparing the tabular output of an SQL
query with the record structure of the queried database.
But to more directly address your point: if your tree contains 10,000+ nodes
it's going to be *damn* hard to find any particular node you're interested
in. Time-honored computer science data structures just don't deal well with
huge volumes of data, and hierarchical divide-and-conquer strategies only go
so far. I'm attempting to suggest something to supplement these things. If
we are going to connect up all the world's data, we're going to have to
invent new ways of dealing with it.
--
--Alan Wexelblat phone: (508)294-7485
Bull Worldwide Information Systems internet: wex@pws.bull.com
Today is Hiroshima Day. Rest in peace 200,000+ innocentswex@dali.pws.bull.com (Buckaroo Banzai) (08/11/90)
In article <26710@unix.cis.pitt.edu> sean@unix.cis.pitt.edu writes: Also, has anyone given thought to treating 'scale' as a dimension of sorts? Yes. This is one of the most important unresolved areas of semantic-space theory. The problem is this: I'd like to have the space be reflexive; that is, I should be able to construct a semantic space to describe the cyberspace-object itself. This would mean that we'd have dimensions which described properties of dimensions, such as size, type, and so on. (If thinking about this too hard gives you a headache, welcome to the club.) One of my compadres in this endeavor called this space a "flight rules" space, meaning that the space would show you the rules used for navigation (or flight) in cyberspace. Anyway, the general problem of how to create the flight-rules space is *very* hard and I have no good ideas, other than build one and try it, then revise based on experience. Anyone with any better ideas - *please* share them with me. -- --Alan Wexelblat phone: (508)294-7485 Bull Worldwide Information Systems internet: wex@pws.bull.com "Politics is Comedy plus Pretense." Newsgroups: sci.virtual-worlds From: wex@dali.pws.bull.com (Buckaroo Banzai) Subject: Re: "Space" Message-Id: <WEX.90Aug10132945@dali.pws.bull.com> Date: 10 Aug 90 17:29:45 GMT References: <9007250107.AA01311@hitl.vrnet.washington.edu> Organization: Bull Worldwide Information Systems Inc. Approved: hitl@hardy.u.washington.edu for virtual-worlds@milton.u.washington.edu (from news@pws.bull.com (Remote NNTP postings)) id <AA27707@slug.pws.bull.com>; Fri, 10 Aug 90 13:25:53 EDT <WEX.90Aug6124507@dali.pws.bull.com> <schraudo.649982297@beowulf> <26710@unix.cis.pitt.edu> Nntp-Posting-Host: dali.pws.bull.com In-Reply-To: sean@unix.cis.pitt.edu's message of 7 Aug 90 21:51:26 GMT In article <26710@unix.cis.pitt.edu> sean@unix.cis.pitt.edu writes: Also, has anyone given thought to treating 'scale' as a dimension of sorts? Yes. This is one of the most important unresolved areas of semantic-space theory. The problem is this: I'd like to have the space be reflexive; that is, I should be able to construct a semantic space to describe the cyberspace-object itself. This would mean that we'd have dimensions which described properties of dimensions, such as size, type, and so on. (If thinking about this too hard gives you a headache, welcome to the club.) One of my compadres in this endeavor called this space a "flight rules" space, meaning that the space would show you the rules used for navigation (or flight) in cyberspace. Anyway, the general problem of how to create the flight-rules space is *very* hard and I have no good ideas, other than build one and try it, then revise based on experience. Anyone with any better ideas - *please* share them with me. -- --Alan Wexelblat phone: (508)294-7485 Bull Worldwide Information Systems internet: wex@pws.bull.com "Politics is Comedy plus Pretense."
brucec%phoebus.phoebus.labs.tek.com@RELAY.CS.NET (Bruce Cohen;;50-662;LP=A;) (08/11/90)
In article <WEX.90Aug6124507@dali.pws.bull.com> wex@dali.pws.bull.com (Buckaroo Banzai) writes: > First some background: I came to the cyberspace party from the field of > software engineering, particularly large-scale software engineering. This > led me to have an interest in the visualization, manipulation, and > navigation of large amounts of abstract information. That matches my background pretty well: I'm a software engineer with an interest in user interfaces to large, complexly- or ill-structured assemblages of information. With luck, we can talk the same language. > ... > > The problem is that this kind of thing rapidly breaks down in the world of > large-scale software engineering. When you have system that's composed of > hundreds of source modules, millions of code lines, thousands of test > programs, tens of thousands of bug reports and fixes and enhancements (not > to mention the mountain of documentation, design, and specification that > came before and along with the code) - well, you can see the problem. Even worse, the most urgent part of the job is often to try to strain out relationships from this mound of, er, "stuff". Things like percentage of test failures per module as a function of time, or network load as a function of mean-time-between revision for a subsystem (the utility of this information is left as an exercise for the reader). Problem being: if you didn't know you would want this information before the project started, do you have the tools to to extract it? > ... > > This is just the visualization problem. The manipulation and navigation > problems are as large or larger, but let's deal with things one at a time. > My experience shows that setting up a good visualization structure can > suggest interaction means that were not thought of beforehand. > Agreed, but that still doesn't address navigation, which is the nastiest of all the problems in my opinion. The whole reason for spatial metaphors is to allow users to apply their highly-evolved spatial perception and visualization systems to the navigation problem. These systems, though, are evolved to handle relatively circumscribed local areas, which may be somewhat, though not arbitrarily, cluttered (like the space in the branches of a temperate zone forest?). They break down in high-dimensional, large hyper-volume spaces. We don't as yet know what aids can help this, or how to optimally filter the perceptions of such spaces for easy navigation. The current best choice seems to be to "project" (in some sense not necessarily related to projective geometry) the navigation space onto some less complex space the user can handle, and provide disambiguation for the inevitable overloaded volumes. I think you need to consider this up front when investigating the spatial qualities of a cyberspace. No matter how interesting a space may be from the viewpoint of abstract organization, if users can't find their way through the maze, it's not a useful space. > ... > > Because the properties of the objects are (more or less) mathematically > describable, we can then say interesting things about the dimensions of > cyberspace. Well, as I implied above, there may be more than one brand of cyberspace. In fact, I'd say it's inevitable that there will be, from market forces alone (but that's another discussion). If the desired qualities of a space are determined by the objects within it, then it follows that different collections of objects should reside in different kinds of space. Maybe what we are calling cyberspace is just an anteroom filled with doors and rabbitholes into these spaces ... > ... > > There are lots of issues here, such as: what about ordering? what kinds of > dimensions should there be? what about properties that are not confined to > a single object, but are the result of object-interaction (such as the > property earlier-version-of, an important concept in software engineering). Yes, please, I'd like to hear your thinking on all these issues. -- --------------------------------------------------------------------------- NOTE: USE THIS ADDRESS TO REPLY, REPLY_TO IN HEADER IS BROKEN! Bruce Cohen, Computer Research Lab email: brucec@tekcrl.labs.tek.com Tektronix Laboratories, Tektronix, Inc. phone: (503)627-5241 M/S 50-662, P.O. Box 500, Beaverton, OR 97077
schraudo%beowulf@ucsd.edu (Nici Schraudolph) (08/13/90)
wex@dali.pws.bull.com (Buckaroo Banzai) writes: >I disagree on two points. First off, people do pretty well with flight >simulators, so we *can* go to 3D (in fact, we spend most of our waking lives >navigating in 3D). Wumpus is a kind of weird space; not very intuitive. Sorry, but humans *don't* do well in general 3D. We spend most of our waking lives on a 2D surface, and have evolved to deal with that. Sure, there is altitude, but gravity and visual clues make the orientation problem along that dimension trivial: you always know which way the ground is. Wumpus is played in a 3D space with additional contraints: the only moves allowed are those between vertices of a dodekaeder. Thus Wumpus is an instantiation of the general 3D navigation problem, and it follows that your performance at general 3D navigation can't be better than at Wumpus. I agree that the constraints are counterintuitive - indeed my whole point is that you get the best mileage by imposing intuitive constraints that are gleaned from nature. >From a cognitive perspective our natural environment might best be described as "2 + 1"D, and this concept is also beneficial when thinking about cyber- space implementations: adding a grid in the zero plane for one of the three coordinates (in case of a semantic space, preferably for the coordinate that represents the quality most "different" from the other two) will aid navigation through the VR, as will simulated gravity effects (eg. a tendency to slowly turn "right side up" in the absence of movement commands). ---- >Second, who says cyberspace should be devoid of cognitive artifacts? I >think there should be lots. Again in a past paper (with Kim Fairchild), we >talk about navigating cyberspace. To do this, we hypothesize the >construction of whole new classes of artifacts to act as navigational aids. Sure. What I'm saying is the less artifacts you need to navigate a given data structure, the better your system, because you are obviously tapping more of the intuitive human navigation potential. Thus the zero-grid suggested above is preferable to having to consult a 3D-compass to find out which way you're headed. ---- >You're confusing theory with implementation. One can implement sparse >arrays in a number of compact, useful forms. Why not do the same for >spaces? Remember, the prime purpose of semantic-space theory is to provide >a natural locative system for abstract data. Sorry, but you're the one confusing abstract data structure with implemen- tation: a sparse array is an *implementation* of a matrix. This might explain why I interpreted your first post as advocating a sparse array *visualization* approach, which I am sure you agree is the least "compact, useful form". It has become obvious now that this is not your approach. ---- >Time-honored computer science data structures just don't deal well with >huge volumes of data, and hierarchical divide-and-conquer strategies only go >so far. I'm attempting to suggest something to supplement these things. Wait a minute - time-honored computer science data structures have been (and are being) invented precisely for the purpose of dealing with huge volumes of data! Implementing visual representations of these structures is a very valuable undertaking in cognitive engineering, and will give a performance advantage by exploiting intuitive human skills such as navigation. However, you seem to claim that your work provides ways of structuring data that are new in a more fundamental, abstract sense. This is a big claim that I have yet to be convinced of. We could play a little game: you name a feature in your system, I name the data structure it is a visual imple- mentation of. I'll be pleasantly surprised if I can't answer. -- Nicol N. Schraudolph, C-014 nici%cs@ucsd.edu University of California, San Diego nici%cs@ucsd.bitnet La Jolla, CA 92093-0114 ...!ucsd!cs!nici
jwtlai%watcgl.waterloo.edu@watcgl.waterloo.edu (Jim W Lai) (08/15/90)
In article <schraudo.650507971@beowulf> schraudo%beowulf@ucsd.edu (Nici Schraudolph) writes: >Wumpus is played in a 3D space with additional contraints: the only moves >allowed are those between vertices of a dodekaeder. Thus Wumpus is an >instantiation of the general 3D navigation problem... I >agree that the constraints are counterintuitive - indeed my whole point >is that you get the best mileage by imposing intuitive constraints that >are gleaned from nature. This may seem parenthetical. I've seen the original Wumpus game in a Creative Computing collection. There is no attempt at aiding the visualization of the space. Each of the vertices is numbered 1 thru 20; there are no navigational directions given, just a list of the vertices that can be moved to. I would argue this space is difficult to navigate as there is no equivalent to directions one can fix on. The author of the game noted that all the playtesters at his site made maps but never arrived at the dodecahedron; in fact, it seemed to him that none of them even realized the vertices were always in the same configuration, judging from trashed maps. A simple way to make Wumpus navigation intuitive would be to add a diagram indicating which surface on the dodecahedron one is on and what the orientations are, relative to the player; this map would be a projection from the surface of a sphere containing the vertices. If I recall my graph theory, the configuration in Wumpus is planar and can be mapped onto 2D. Wumpus had no real navigational interface. It could have been made reasonably intuitive. It is trivial to make a nonintuitive system.
cdshaw@cs.ualberta.ca (Chris Shaw) (08/16/90)
In article <19539@well.sf.ca.us> (Owen Rowley) writes: >> > TIME is just another space, one that we have forgotten how to travel >> > freely in. >> 1. I cannot but interpret this to mean that humans have had the ability to >> journey through time. This to me is not a justifiable scientific statement. > >I have personally performed experiments >which took place *outside* the light cone, and the results were definitly >"time travel" in the literal sense. Now it's all fine and good for me to say >this, and it's a foregone conclusion that folks like this guy who cannot >justify science that he doesn't understand, will think I'm full of shit. >My experiments and results are subjective in nature and only valuable to me. This is all very nice and sanitary, but the only thing it proves is that you can convince yourself that you can travel in time. To convince other people, you must submit to skeptical inquiry. That's what science is all about. If you can only prove it to you, who cares? >However I have benefited by the knowledge gained in the experiment, what else >matters! What else matters is how much air one takes up spouting nonsense. The issue here isn't one of honesty to oneself, it's about honesty to one's fellow man. Until proven otherwise, I'm afraid that I don't buy this claim that you can travel in time in any way but forward one second at a time. I am also uninterested in a definition of "time travel" reduces to the viewing of archival materials. Remember that the burden of proof is not on the person hearing the claim, but on the person making the claim. >D. Owen Rowley {uunet,pyramid,sun}!autodesk!owen -- Chris Shaw University of Alberta cdshaw@cs.UAlberta.ca Now with new, minty Internet flavour! CatchPhrase: Bogus as HELL !
wex@dali.pws.bull.com (Buckaroo Banzai) (08/18/90)
In article <schraudo.650507971@beowulf> schraudo%beowulf@ucsd.edu (Nici Schraudolph) writes:
Sorry, but humans *don't* do well in general 3D. We spend most of our
waking lives on a 2D surface, and have evolved to deal with that. Sure,
there is altitude, but gravity and visual clues make the orientation
problem along that dimension trivial: you always know which way the
ground is.
This is more or less the point Meredith Bricken made. I see your point, but
I don't know any of these thing when I'm playing the various flight
simulators (particularly in those modes that remove external cues like the
horizon), and I don't do too badly.
Besides, what's to stop us putting in all kinds of cognitive artifacts to
help us out? In fact, I advocate doing just that. Landmarks are just one
example.
Wumpus is played in a 3D space with additional contraints: the only moves
allowed are those between vertices of a dodekaeder. Thus Wumpus is an
instantiation of the general 3D navigation problem, and it follows that your
performance at general 3D navigation can't be better than at Wumpus.
I don't see that this follows at all. I do much better in the flight
simulators and 3D space-battle games than I do at Wumpus.
you get the best mileage by imposing intuitive constraints that
are gleaned from nature.
I don't think so, but I'm willing to be proven wrong. What sort of
experience do you base this idea on?
From a cognitive perspective our natural environment might best be described
as "2 + 1"D, and this concept is also beneficial when thinking about cyber-
space implementations: adding a grid in the zero plane for one of the three
coordinates (in case of a semantic space, preferably for the coordinate
that represents the quality most "different" from the other two) will aid
navigation through the VR, as will simulated gravity effects (eg. a tendency
to slowly turn "right side up" in the absence of movement commands).
Having a horizon is one of the first artifacts I'd put in. I'm not entirely
sure about a grid, since it might interfere with seeing the objects. I'd
like to get my hands on a good enough 3D rendering system that I could
experiment with shadows. I'd put a single light source at a constant
distance and simply allow shadows to appear (on the zero plane?). Again,
though, this is implementation - not necessarily part of the theory.
Sure. What I'm saying is the less artifacts you need to navigate a given
data structure, the better your system, because you are obviously tapping
more of the intuitive human navigation potential. Thus the zero-grid
suggested above is preferable to having to consult a 3D-compass to find
out which way you're headed.
Again, I'm dubious about any claim that includes the word "obvious." What
data do you base this idea on? I bet I can make a cybercompass that's
better than your zero-grid, particularly when we're trying to find a place
or object that's described by more than three interesting properties.
Wait a minute - time-honored computer science data structures have been (and
are being) invented precisely for the purpose of dealing with huge volumes
of data!
Sorry, but that's simply not the case. Flowcharts, trees, graphs, et al
were invented *long* before there were million LOC programs. Indeed, at MCC
we did field studies and found engineer after engineer who had been in the
business for decades and who were growing increasingly frustrated that their
time-tested methods simply couldn't help them with the increasingly complex
problems they were facing.
Implementing visual representations of these structures is a very
valuable undertaking in cognitive engineering, and will give a performance
advantage by exploiting intuitive human skills such as navigation.
I don't find anything intuitive about a flowchart or a dataflow diagram or
an entity-relation diagram. If you've got some other meaning of intuitive,
or if you're talking about some other "representations" or "structures"
please let me know.
However, you seem to claim that your work provides ways of structuring data
that are new in a more fundamental, abstract sense. This is a big claim
that I have yet to be convinced of. We could play a little game: you name
a feature in your system, I name the data structure it is a visual imple-
mentation of. I'll be pleasantly surprised if I can't answer.
OK, let's start with fisheye views. If that's too easy for you, try
generalized degree-of-interest functions.
In a sense it's a losing game for me in that if I ever hope to implement my
theories I'm going to have to do it in terms of computationally-realizable
structures, any of which are amenable to multiple conventional and
unconventional representations.
--
--Alan Wexelblat phone: (508)294-7485
Bull Worldwide Information Systems internet: wex@pws.bull.com
"Politics is Comedy plus Pretense."schraudo%beowulf@ucsd.edu (Nici Schraudolph) (08/24/90)
electro!jwtlai%watcgl.waterloo.edu@watcgl.waterloo.edu (Jim W Lai) writes: >This may seem parenthetical. I've seen the original Wumpus game in a >Creative Computing collection. There is no attempt at aiding the >visualization of the space. Each of the vertices is numbered 1 thru 20; >there are no navigational directions given, just a list of the vertices >that can be moved to. I would argue this space is difficult to navigate as >there is no equivalent to directions one can fix on. The author of the >game noted that all the playtesters at his site made maps but never arrived >at the dodecahedron; in fact, it seemed to him that none of them even Oops, you're right, I forgot about the original Wumpus setup. I referred to a beefed-up version of the game that I used to play ages ago; that one had a VR-style graphical interface: you would see a simple view of the corridor in front of you, with other corridors branching off the sides. Wall colors were used as landmarks. Still not very intuitive. -- Nicol N. Schraudolph, C-014 nici%cs@ucsd.edu University of California, San Diego nici%cs@ucsd.bitnet La Jolla, CA 92093-0114 ...!ucsd!cs!nici
schraudo%beowulf@ucsd.edu (Nici Schraudolph) (08/29/90)
wex@dali.pws.bull.com (Buckaroo Banzai) writes: >In article <schraudo.650507971@beowulf> schraudo%beowulf@ucsd.edu (Nici Schraudolph) writes: > there is altitude, but gravity and visual clues make the orientation > problem along that dimension trivial: you always know which way the > ground is. >This is more or less the point Meredith Bricken made. I see your point, but >I don't know any of these thing when I'm playing the various flight >simulators (particularly in those modes that remove external cues like the >horizon), and I don't do too badly. Ah, but even then your instrumentation will have a "2+1 D" setup, with a compass for two dimensions and an altimeter for the third. Or do you have a simulator that allows you to navigate by 3-D compass alone? -------- >Besides, what's to stop us putting in all kinds of cognitive artifacts to >help us out? In fact, I advocate doing just that. Landmarks are just one >example. Oh, I agree totally - in fact my virtual horizon suggestion is just another such artifact. My point is that artifacts that humans know intuitively how to deal with are preferable to those that come with a 500-page manual. Isn't one of the main selling points of VR that it allows you to make very abstract operations concrete and intuitive? > Sure. What I'm saying is the less artifacts you need to navigate a given > data structure, the better your system, because you are obviously tapping > more of the intuitive human navigation potential. Thus the zero-grid > suggested above is preferable to having to consult a 3D-compass to find > out which way you're headed. >Again, I'm dubious about any claim that includes the word "obvious." What >data do you base this idea on? I bet I can make a cybercompass that's >better than your zero-grid, particularly when we're trying to find a place >or object that's described by more than three interesting properties. You're right in that artifacts can of course make navigation easier, after all that's the whole point of having them. What I was trying to say is that if I can find data from a DB using complex navigation artifacts with interface A, but can do the same job with less or no artifacts using interface B, I'd say that B is better than A. I am not suggesting that you shouldn't have all sorts of artifacts, just that if B is so powerful even without them it will be even better with them. -------- > Wait a minute - time-honored computer science data structures have been (and > are being) invented precisely for the purpose of dealing with huge volumes > of data! >Sorry, but that's simply not the case. Flowcharts, trees, graphs, et al >were invented *long* before there were million LOC programs. Indeed, at MCC >we did field studies and found engineer after engineer who had been in the >business for decades and who were growing increasingly frustrated that their >time-tested methods simply couldn't help them with the increasingly complex >problems they were facing. > Implementing visual representations of these structures is a very > valuable undertaking in cognitive engineering, and will give a performance > advantage by exploiting intuitive human skills such as navigation. >I don't find anything intuitive about a flowchart or a dataflow diagram or >an entity-relation diagram. If you've got some other meaning of intuitive, >or if you're talking about some other "representations" or "structures" >please let me know. OK, I see the problem... to me as computer science type a "data structure" is an abstract mathematical entity, namely a set of data objects and a set of operations defined on these objects. To me, any kind of diagram is not a data structure since no operations are defined on it. Thus when I say "graph" I mean a set of nodes and edges, plus operations to traverse the structure, not some kind of diagram with circles and arcs. That's just visualization. > However, you seem to claim that your work provides ways of structuring data > that are new in a more fundamental, abstract sense. This is a big claim > that I have yet to be convinced of. We could play a little game: you name > a feature in your system, I name the data structure it is a visual imple- > mentation of. I'll be pleasantly surprised if I can't answer. >OK, let's start with fisheye views. If that's too easy for you, try >generalized degree-of-interest functions. These also seem to be data transformations rather than full-blown data structures in their own right to me. In particular, you have toimplement them on top of some existing data structure in order to access the data you want to transform in the first place. >In a sense it's a losing game for me in that if I ever hope to implement my >theories I'm going to have to do it in terms of computationally-realizable >structures, any of which are amenable to multiple conventional and >unconventional representations. Exactly. It seems that we were mostly having terminology problems, which have caused both of us to read claims into each other's posts that were not there... peace? :-) -- Nicol N. Schraudolph, C-014 "Big Science, hallelujah. University of California, San Diego Big Science, yodellayheehoo." La Jolla, CA 92093-0114 - Laurie Anderson. nici%cs@ucsd.{edu,bitnet,ucsd}