Interesting quote from AI book

[RE01 Rice Brian T. EM2]

> While reeding this dusty and yellowing book on AI, that is almost as old
> as I
> am, I came across this quote which says much about the limitations of
> simple
> equations:
> 
> "... Formulas are essnces of irreversibly distilled from general
> techniques for
> summary and speed."
> 
> I think this is relevant to tunes because it seems that one of the
> objectives of
> the tunes project is to reverse this distillation and creat a truly
> general
> technique for running and programming a computer. Comments?
> 
yes, to formalize, the 'distillation' is an exchange of information for
applicability to a given context (or vocabulary).  a formula is good for
communicating exactly one piece of information: the return value.  it is
optimized for exactly one thing: speed on a particular machine (even a
human).

what we seek is the original set of relationships that contain the most
amount of information, at a reasonable cost.  we want a set of relationships
that can be abstracted from its domain into any 'direction'.  the _problem_
with this idea is that it is very implicit, or subconscious, to us.  we as
humans don't have to reify this concept because our minds do it for us.
that is why we must seek solutions (i believe) that are sub-structural to
language (and logic).  languages and logics are interfaces, and as such we
could call them formula schema (or read-only meta-models or something).

i hate to keep harping on this, but the arrow system was conceived to answer
this problem.  (whether it does or not is debatable).  each arrow represents
an atom of information.   these atoms collect into (semi-)logical relations
(called graphs) that describe relationships among groups of information
atoms.  since these relations can be combined in arbitrary ways, they should
be able to model something reasonably complicated (perhaps any intuitive
concept).

lets' assume that it takes N graphs of arrows to describe all of the aspects
of an equation embodied by a written statement.  these N graphs wouldn't
apply to just that equation, though.

example:
		n=m+1

there would be an arrow between the atoms for 'n' and 'm+1' that would be
part of the graph linked to '=' (think of '=' as a relation, and as a set of
arrows).
there would be an atom for 'm+1' would be an arrow in the '+' graph linking
the atoms for 'm' and '1'.
'n', 'm', and '1' would be arrows (selectors) from sets of atoms: 'n' and
'm' would be part of a particular user context vocabulary (called an
ontology), and '1' would be an arrow from the set of natural or integer or
whatever kinds of numbers (again, in a graph).

this looks like a good place to start discussion...  any comments?