Re: Resiliency To New Data Requirements

From: Bob Badour <bbadour_at_pei.sympatico.ca>
Date: Mon, 07 Aug 2006 11:48:11 GMT
Message-ID: <%LFBg.36175$pu3.473127@ursa-nb00s0.nbnet.nb.ca>

Keith H Duggar wrote:

> Bob Badour wrote:
>

>>Marshall wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Neo wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>>>[Neo] has seized upon a number of ideas ... for some particular, unspecified task.
>>>>
>>>>That task has been to find the most general method of representing
>>>>things.
>>>
>>>Answering that question is easy. The most general method of
>>>representing things is to use bits.
>>
>>There is a more general method, which is to use sets. See formalism as a
>>foundation of mathematics.
>>
>>{} is the canonical set with zero elements and represents zero or false
>>{{}} is the canonical set with one element and represents one or true
>>{{},{{}}} is the canonical set with two elements etc.

>
> I would have said the "most general way of representing
> things" is a sequence of symbols from an alphabet. Of which
> {}, {{}}, {{}{{}}}, along with the characters I'm using now
> to represent English, predicate logic, etc are all examples.
> If you limit the alphabet to only two symbols 0 and 1 then
> you have binary sequences.

Ah, now we are getting into the representations of our representations. My suggestion for most general uses only a single concept: set. Yours uses three concepts: 0, 1 and sequence. Received on Mon Aug 07 2006 - 06:48:11 CDT