Why Hypergraphs?

[Linas Vepstas]

There is one thing that is not well-explained in opencog, and takes a while to figure out on your own: why is the OpenCog Atomspace based on hypergraphs? And, perhaps, 'why should you care'?

I just wrote a blog entry providing a simple introductory explanation for this.  Its motivates the need,  then attempts to anchor the need on a rigorous mathematical footing of model theory, category theory and type theory. It concludes with a sketchy argument of how, if you want to do AGI, you will, by design or by accident, rediscover the concept of the OpenCog atomspace. 

Blog entry here:

http://blog.opencog.org/2013/03/24/why-hypergraphs/

I really think it might get newcomers/newbies to begin to understand what this one corner of OpenCog is all about.

--linas

p.s. the reason I'm cross-posting this to link-grammar is that I havereally had to think about these  issues recently, as I am trying to re-write Link Grammar so that it become machine-learnable, and I need an infrastructure to integrate machine learning and natural language parsing.