PRACTICAL MEMETICS – (Keywords: Artificial Intelligence - memetics)

MEMOLINKER, a tool for CAT (Computer Assisted Thinking)

Background - The high expectations associated to Machine Translation (MT) some ten years ago has been replaced by a more realistic approach based on a panoply of translation tools that allow the translator to accelerate the search procedures and to replace automatically some words or sentences. No more need of those sophisticated syntactic rules that must be updated all the time at the price of hurting other syntactic algorithms.

Now - Similarly, the hope (for whom?, may be for me) of developping an “Ideas generator” tool (an ideotron) should be discarded in favor of a more realistic approach based on the use of a MEMOLINKER, a tool that links the concepts in your text to other MEMES or ideas (laws, principles, quotations, proverbs… ) which make use of that concept.

This system is based on applying to a text –the text you want to use as a base for developping new ideas- a 2 columns Excel table structured in this way:

Supply	SUPPLY creates its own DEMAND (Say, law)
Demand	SUPPLY creates its own DEMAND (Say, law)
Handicap	HANDICAP (Zahavi -principle)
Bookkeeping	BOOKKEEPING principles applied to ECONOMICS (Walras – law)
Economics	BOOKKEEPING principles applied to ECONOMICS (Walras – law)
Firms	MAKE or BUY decision – FIRMS – TRANSACTION COSTS in MARKETS (Coase – Theorem)
Transaction	MAKE or BUY decision – FIRMS – TRANSACTION COSTS in MARKETS (Coase – Theorem)
Costs	MAKE or BUY decision – FIRMS – TRANSACTION COSTS in MARKETS (Coase – Theorem)
Markets	MAKE or BUY decision – FIRMS – TRANSACTION COSTS in MARKETS (Coase – Theorem)

Academe	ACADEME, n. An ancient school where MORALity and philosophy were taught. (Ambrose Bierce)
Actors	I never said all ACTORS are cattle; what I said was all ACTORS should be treated like cattle (  -- Alfred Hitchcock )
Adolescence	You don't have to suffer to be a POET; ADOLESCENCE is enough suffering for anyone. (John Ciardi)
Advice	Don't give a WOMAN ADVICE; one should never give a WOMAN anything she can't wear in the evening (  -- Oscar Wilde )

As you see, you have a definition of the laws or principles in the right column, and each of the concepts handled by those laws in the left column. (I have developed an Excel macro that makes that kind of table starting from a single column one which contains only the definitions cell by cell –with capitalized keywords).

Just imagine that you have a table with several hundreds/thousands of definitions associated to their respective keywords. And imagine that you have the right software to go through a text screening it with each of the concepts you have in the left column. Each time you find one of those words in the text, you insert in it, as a comment, the related idea – the definition contained in the adjacent cell. In this way, at the end of the process you may have several words in the same sentence or paragraph pointing to different ideas.

Think carefully: that’s how you would like your humble brain to behave in front of any given text. Intelligence is the ability to link concepts in creative ways. The machine will have linked some related words to one or several possible ideas, giving you the opportunity to discover new associations between the concepts underlying those words.

The good news is that we have the software for doing that. The technology has been developed as a Word macro called AuTerm. Some translators of the UN system have been using it for some time already. Google has developed lately a similar technology for showing you the translation of any word as a screentip in the htm text you browse with Explorer.

Any person interested in helping to build a big “memetable” will be welcome at criterce@hotmail.com. I have already built a table (some 1500 records).

The macro AuTerm can also be made available at request.

Look at an an example of the application of AuTerm to a text on memetics that I found on the web. I made the macro to use the memetable mentioned above.

Further applications:

-1- I have also made a further elaboration of that memetable, by

- isolating the keywords in capitals in each definition

- putting them in another adjacent cell at their right, in the same row

- linking those adjacent cells to the cells (under or above) of those concepts where that keyword appears.

In this way we can surf the table from keyword to keyword with intralinks. See the result in this “table”. (Be patient, this is a heavy table, because of the weight of all those intralinks).

It is easy to see that we might also link the ideas to other ideas contained in other Sheets of the same Excel file, in what might be considered a tridimensional set of layers of intralinked and extralinked memetables. Each one corresponding, for example, to a different book, a different area of knowledge…

-2- PROMPTER GLASSES: In the future, people will be able to use a similar technology –incorporating GPS and connexion to huge databases- for receiving information through their everyday life. I imagine somekind of “omniscient glasses”. Their users would see a digital image of their surroundings at any moment, with the possibility of calling (through persistent focusing and/or blinks?) a virtual prompter (sound or text) of any detail they are interested in about their physical -even psychological, even physiological (through body sensors)- context. Of course, the users should be able to choose before a particular topic or category of information, so as not to receive irrelevant data. But they would have instant access to a really huge amount of information.

The data could also be requested verbally through a cell phone incorporated/attached to the glasses. Imagine a bus or train full of commuters using this technology while going to work.

-3- Another possibility, this one quite feasible now (I have to start working on it), would be to apply the linker in the field of mathematics. The memetables would become equation tables: any concept that might be quantificated would be in the first column, associated in the right cell to a number of equations in which it would be implicated. That would assist mathematical thinking, or just those interested in finding quantitative relations between concepts. Of course, this mathematical linker might be used in combination with the text linker.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

See also the interesting concept of memex

“Special issue” on CREATIVITY in New Scientist

October 2, 2006