Sunday, December 04, 2005
Center of Excellence Proposal
à
[bead thread on curriculum
reform]
The Taos Institute
(on the possibilities)
Dick,
Your project at UCI sounds like an outstanding piece of work, and I believe that the general principle that "the Physical Theory of Knowledge and Computation is founded in purest physics and not on either automata nor digital anything" is a very important idea.
In fact, the idea of working with continuous fields for processing conceptual graphs is the basis for the VivoMind Analogy Engine (VAE) and some other work Arun Majumdar and I have been doing. Following is a paper we published about VAE and its applications:
http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/analog.htm
Analogical Reasoning
That paper discusses VAE from the outside without saying anything about how it is implemented. Earlier this year, Arun and I gave a talk at NRL about VAE and what is going on under the covers:
http://www.jfsowa.com/talks/continuo.pdf
Continuous Numeric Methods for Supporting Learning and Reasoning
Note the word "continuous". We are not using partial differential equations, but we are using geometrical algebras, topology, and fiber bundles.
The source information can be anything that is representable in conceptual graphs -- that includes natural languages, logic, databases, or whatever. But from the graphs, we compute "knowledge signatures" that use continuous methods. As a result, we can find analogies in (N log N) time, instead of the N-cubed time of the traditional digital methods. But that is just one application of the idea, there's a lot more that can be done.
John