Re: [topicmaps-comment] Everchanging subjects [ Notions haveexistence...]

["Thomas B. Passin" <tpassin@home.com>]

[Paul Stephen Prueitt]

> But my attempts to create software is not important.  What is important is
> that a stratified complexity paradigm be developed and adopted that has a
> route to computational emergance.  This route, in my opinion can not be
> completely made within a data structure using solely computational
> processes.
>

Paul, do you see the work of Doug Hofstader and his group as having a close
relationship to the things you are talking about?  I'm referring to the
combinatorial discovery programs like the series solver and so on, that
build temporary recursive structures drawn from a fixed store, using scoring
systems and probabilistic methods to construct additional structures?

On another note, I was just thinking about what might be the complexity of
real world maps - I mean ones in peoples' heads, not topic maps per se - and
how could be discover this?  Here's one line of thought.  Apparently
American high schools students know some 60,000-80,000 words, maybe many
more if they are good readers (according to Paul Bloon in "How Children
Learn the Meanings of Words").  Suppose we were to make a topic map of this
vocabulary.  Then there would be at least 60,000-80,000 topics right there.
But people have many associations for each word, and in fact different ones
for a word used in different contexts.  Say on the average a person has 10
associations for each word (it would be many more for familiar words).  Now
we are close to a million things in the map.

No doubt this is just scratching the surface, and already we are up to a
gigantic map.  Pretty impressive!

Cheers,

Tom P