Categorising and naming things September 1, 2009
I am well intrigued by the way the mind works, especially when it comes to trying to emulate the processes of the mind, and there is none more mystical, and perplexing than how we categorise things, categorising seems to me to be the highest skill imaginable in a human, it seems to be the most mystical, the most important, and as a computer scientist, the hardest to emulate, or even model. Of course we categorise things all the time in computing, to look at any website navigation menu, list of links or layout option, it is very obvious that these are categorised, but more often than not they have been deliberately categorised by hand, by a human, and that’s what I’m getting at, we can’t get computers to do it quite yet, although it seems so very simple, natural, and thoughtless for a human, perhaps it’s the biggest difference between us and computers. I don’t know about anyone else, but in every software project I do, I wrestle with the idea of how to program a computer to categorise and name things, it always becomes computer science, and ends in philosophy, this is my david stone, I have a huge chunk of stone like Michaelangelo, and every day I think, I come outside with a chisel, and take a little bit of it…
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