Tuesday, July 3, 2018

Recording a new piece of information in nested contexts - makeRecord()

I wrote the details of an algorithm today, called makeRecord(), that handles the task of processing context specific text and recording it in the data structure of nested contexts that I have been developing. The algorithm makes some pretty heavy assumptions:

  • that the context can be updated in the order of most general to least general, and 
  • that the new context is the least general common context containing both the new and the previous details
  • that text can be de-serialized into a nested data structure by these assumptions
The reason it is "heavy" is the proposed uniform and simple way to parse meaning, more or less independent of grammar and syntax. 

Equivalence of action and speech

I guess my philosophy is that the way I think and plan to act is equivalent to the way I talk about things. As I explore the possibility of analyzing 'reality' in terms of nested, conceptual-linguistic, contexts, I am starting to see a world around me that I can speak of in more than one way and which tries to organize itself as nested entities within entities. One of the reasons the "Windows" UI was such a success - is that it really is intrinsic to reality, in the sense of the above.

Now, let me come back to the puzzle of 'single part with attribute' equivalence with 'single attribute'. I do believe I can construe the same thing in two different ways and that I am designed to use one or the other when I am planning. Sorry to be vague.

Another short term payoff for thinking in terms of nested contexts is the possibilities of cognitive theorems like this one: changing properties of a part of a context cannot cause a switch in context.

Monday, July 2, 2018

He said...

Then I felt my brain drifting off in the direction of Cuttyhunk

A principle of nested frames

Setting the properties of part of a context, does not change the context. For example, in the context of a discussion of fruit, I cannot change to discussion oranges when I describe an apple's color. [Not sure that example works....how about:] When changing the material on an abutment, that does not change the tooth number

Alexa "skill" for chopping vegetables

Saw this being marketed and think: so, narrow world language programming is gaining a foothold.

Thursday, June 28, 2018

Whatever happened to those flower arrangements?

They meant a lot more than I let on. (See here and here)

GitHub - where are my stars?

I have a hard time finding the Narwhal repo on GitHub if I search for it using tags. Other repos with thousands of stars are better placed in the search results. Poor Narwhal has something like only 8 stars total. So I just looked at an "nlp"  project that had 1.4K stars and it was a list of links to documents and source code on nlp.
Really? That is 2 orders of magnitude more stars than Narwhal and zero independent content. I think this shows that stars are only one metric and GitHub [Microsoft are you listening] should provide other ranking methods.