Re: A Normalization Question

"Larry Coon" <lcnospam_at_assist.org> wrote in message news:40EC69EB.723F_at_assist.org...
> Tony wrote:
>
> > You are of course confusing logical and physical issues - and your
> > issue is absurd in any case. It is not LOGICALLY redundant to record
> > that "Car X is brown" and "Dog Y is brown", because these are two
> > different facts. You are presumably saying that it is PHYSICALLY
> > redundant to store the 5 characters of "brown" twice on the disk, and
> > so you want to physically store the word "brown" once and then point
> > to it many times.
>
> You couldn't do that -- if more than one thing POINTS
> to "brown," then the pointers are stored redundantly.
> Infinite regress rears its ugly head.
>
Yes! Neo read and listen!

The proof of the inconsistency of your logic and its inception as a fallacy is here, stated succinctly by Mr. Coon.

To eliminate redundancy of words (sequences of characters), you create one word and subsequently create references or pointers to that that word. But this is not good enough. These characters within sequences are redundant themselves, so you create references or pointers to a single symbol.

But then these references or pointer values are redundant, so to ensure no redundancy in these values, you must create a new set of pointers or references using a new alphabet. But wait! Even this new set of pointers/or references have values, both in terms of digits and as a sequence, that are needlessly replicated, so a new set is needed to point to the pointers that pointed to the pointers that point to a single value.

I leave it as an exercise to see how far you can go repeating this cycle before you finally get the "ultimate generalized form of normalization", where no duplication of a symbolic value exists.

Otherwise you can skip that and attempt to eliminate redundancy at the bit level. Of course the only two values you could use are 0 and 1 which gives you two states to create both values and unique non-redundant references or pointers. Good luck with that one!

Another option would be to create an alphabet that no one uses or is aware of that consists of enough symbols to ensure that there will never be a need to replicate the symbol in a database ever again. The tens of thousands of chinese symbols is but a drop in the bucket in comparison to this endeavor. When you get this done, you can get rid of the binary, octal, decimal, and hex number systems and create a 1 digit numeric base system where each numeric value, integer or real, is represented as a single symbol, don't forget up to infinity, and infintessimally small!

Good Luck!

> Larry Coon
> University of California

• Dan