

Jorn Barger on AI: "Fractal Thicket" Indexing - thaumaturgy
http://www.robotwisdom.com/ai/thicketfaq.html

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lacker
I agree with the basic point that a hierarchy is too sparse of a format to
represent human knowledge. For a single category there are many different ways
you might want to break it up. Like if I am trying to organize the category of
Trees... if I am trying to build a fire I am going to mentally organize trees
by "distance to me" and "burnability". Whereas if I am going to build a tire
swing I am going to mentally organize trees by "is it in my backyard" and
"does it have sturdy branches". But a scientific approach would be entirely
different from either of these, and useless for either of my tasks.

But he seems to jump from "a regular hierarchy is too sparse" straight to
"therefore we need a special super dense hierarchy". Maybe the hierarchy
metaphor is the wrong one for this task.

Here's the logic that seems questionable to me:

 _But I hated the idea of having to search thru all ten zillion complex items,
looking for matches to some pattern. I wanted an indexing scheme that allowed
you to step right to exactly those right items. And what gradually came clear
to me was that the general topology to allow this, has to place a self-similar
sub-hierarchy under each node on the simple hierarchy, trees within trees
within trees._

Why focus on the problem of "how to handle ten zillion items"? There are
plenty of ways to get only a relevant subset of data out of a sea of
irrelevant data. The real problem is what sort of AI data structure can help
with some useful task, and this totally ignores the question of "what could
you do with a fractal thicket".

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drcode
Yeah, I've read that post several times over the last few years- Well worth a
read.

It's a pretty impenetrable line of thinking. He hasn't fully formed his ideas
but there's definitely "something" there.

~~~
thaumaturgy
This is the first time I've run across this guy. He's a pretty interesting
character.

There isn't quite enough substance to what he described for me to make any
conclusions on it, but it got me thinking.

I kinda wish he'd be willing to accept enough money to stop being homeless and
start turning this idea into some working code.

