More Thinking about Thinking
I’ve frequently tried to come up with a way to make my computer match my thought process. In particular, a means to keep track of all the electronic cruft that builds up over time (movies, music, documents, email, bookmarks, etc.). I’ve tried coming up with some idea of how this information might be stored and how everything is structured without really finding a good mapping. Maybe the problem is that there isn’t one.
Part of the problem is that our mids are not heirarchichal. We understand such things, and we use them to construct meaningful relationships between things, but our minds aren’t constructed that way naturally (I think). I think this creeps through when we watch people trying to navigate deeply nested information structures; such things generally give people headaches rather than being useful.
So where do we go from here then? Well, the structure of the brain is most closely mapped to a network (see Neural Nets). We can map this to an information structure pretty easily (see The Brain, etc.). This allows for more complex relationships than a tree structure as it allows for nodes to be cross connected across heirarchies. In other words, we allow information to belong to multiple sets.
So how can we make a computer work this way? Well, I’ve yet to see a good implementation of a network structure, or at least a usable one. So here’s a simple architecture: information is stored in a database, keyed by topic. Each node in this database has a primary topic and can have an arbitrary number of sub topics. We view this by taking “slices” of the information set, presenting the closest matches, along with near matches. Of course, the next thing you ask is “Hey, that sounds like a search engine!”. Why yes it does! I think this is why Google is so popular. Anyways, so yes, basically I think the best way for us to archive information (and I thinks this goes for our hard drives as well) is to dro it all in a database, automatically (and implicitly) cross-link the hell out of it, then use Google to search it. I really think this would work better. I think…
Last thought: why can’t I ever make it to the bottom of a post without totally losing any semblance of logic or stucture? Maybe my attention span is too short…