Category Archives: Inquiry

Comments I made in reply to a correspondent’s questions about delimiters and tokenizing in the Learner module may be worth sharing here. In one of the projects I submitted toward a Master’s in psychology I used the Theme One program to … Continue reading →

Since I’m working from decades‑old memories of first inklings I thought I might peruse the web for current information about Zipf’s Law.  I see there is now something called the Zipf–Mandelbrot (and sometimes –Pareto) Law and that was interesting because … Continue reading →

From Zipf’s Law and the category of “things that vary inversely with frequency” I got my first brush with the idea that keeping track of usage frequencies is part and parcel of building efficient codes. In its first application the … Continue reading →

Sometime around 1970 John B. Eulenberg came from Stanford to direct Michigan State’s Artificial Language Lab, where I would come to spend many interesting hours hanging out all through the 70s and 80s.  Along with its research program the lab … Continue reading →

A side‑effect of working on the Theme One program over the course of a decade was the measure of insight it gave me into the reasons why empiricists and rationalists have so much trouble understanding each other, even when those … Continue reading →

The main idea behind the Theme One program is the efficient use of graph-theoretic data structures for the tasks of “learning” and “reasoning”. I am thinking of learning in the sense of learning about an environment, in essence, gaining information about … Continue reading →