Theme One Program

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Jon Awbrey

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May 15, 2018, 10:12:19 AM5/15/18
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Sys Sci Group,

I'm working again on the documentation for my Theme One program,
that formed a big part of my work on Inquiry Driven Systems, and
I'm recycling pieces of that on my blog at Inquiry Into Inquiry.
Here's a page collecting links to the current state of things:

Survey of Theme One Program
https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2018/02/25/survey-of-theme-one-program-%e2%80%a2-2/

Many thanks to Joe Simpson for resurrecting the program on GitHub.
I'll use this thread to discuss the project motives and strategies.

Regards,

Jon

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Jon Awbrey

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May 15, 2018, 3:24:54 PM5/15/18
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Theme One Motivation • 1
http://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2018/05/15/theme-one-motivation-%e2%80%a2-1/

Sys Sci Group,

The main idea behind the Theme One program is the efficient use
of graph-theoretic data structures for the tasks of “learning”
and “doing logic”.

I am thinking of “learning” in the sense of “learning about
an environment”, in other words, acquiring information about
the nature of an environment and being able to apply that
information to some purpose.

Under the heading of “doing logic” I am merely lumping together
all the ordinary sorts of practical activities that would probably
occur to most people under that name.

There is a natural relation between these tasks, as learning the
character of an environment typically leads to the recognition of
laws that govern that environment, and this leads to the requirement
of being able to reason logically about those laws in abstract terms.

Aleksandar Malečić

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May 15, 2018, 5:01:49 PM5/15/18
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"working again", "I'm recycling pieces of that" - I really appreciate what Joseph (Joe) Simpson is doing even though I wasn't following much the progress lately. I suppose there should be some progenitors, people doing something similar and succeeding or failing, people stuck in problems they can't properly address or solve without proper "learning about an environment", etc. I improvise (while thinking and writing) a lot and apologize if my comment doesn't make much sense.

Aleksandar

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joseph simpson

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May 16, 2018, 11:59:29 AM5/16/18
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Team:

The Theme One program might be a great fit with the structural modeling software we have been developing.

The Github repository is at:


Take care, be good to yourself and have fun,

Joe

Jon Awbrey

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May 18, 2018, 9:45:27 AM5/18/18
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Theme One Motivation • 2
https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2018/05/17/theme-one-motivation-%e2%80%a2-2/

Sys Sci Group,

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 two styles
of thinking inhabit the very same soul.

The way it came about was this. The code from which the program is currently assembled initially came from two distinct
programs, ones I developed in alternate years, at first only during the summers.

In the Learner program I sought to implement a Humean empiricist style of learning algorithm for the adaptive uptake of
coded sequences of occurrences in the environment, say, as codified in a formal language. I knew all the theorems from
formal language theory that tell how limited any such strategy must ultimately be in terms of its generative capacity,
but I wanted to explore the boundaries of that capacity in concrete computational terms.

In the Modeler program I aimed to implement a variant of Peirce’s graphical syntax for propositional logic, making use
of graph-theoretic extensions I had developed over the preceding decade.

As I mentioned, work on these two projects proceeded in a parallel series of fits and starts through interwoven summers
for several years, and then, somewhere along the line, I can’t remember just when, I realized that the Learner, one of
whose other names happened to be Index, could be put to work helping with sundry substitution tasks that needed to be
done by the Modeler, one of whose other names happened to be Slate, since it evoked innate ideas of the tabula rasa.

So I began to integrate the Learner and the Modeler, at first still working on the two component modules in an
alternating manner, but devoting a portion of effort toward the task of amalgamating their principal data structures,
bringing them into convergence with each other, and unifying them over a common basis.

Another round of seasons and many changes of mind and mood and programming style, I arrived at basically the same
graph-theoretical data structure, strung like a wire through the far-flung pearls of my programmed wit. But the pearls
I polished in alternate years maintained their shine along axes of polarization whose grains remained skew in regard to
each other. That is to say, all the strategies that appeared to be the smartest tricks to pull from the standpoint of
optimizing the program’s performance on the Learning task I found the next year were the dumbest moves to pull from the
standpoint of its performance on the Reasoning task. I gradually came to appreciate this as a discovery ...

Regards,

Jon

joseph simpson

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May 18, 2018, 2:19:37 PM5/18/18
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Jon:

Thanks for the detailed context...

Looking forward to the rest of the material..

Take care, be good to yourself and have fun,

Joe
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Joe Simpson

“Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. 

Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. 

All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people.”

George Bernard Shaw

Jon Awbrey

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May 20, 2018, 10:04:30 AM5/20/18
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Questions in another forum led me to say a little more
about the origin and early years of the Learner module:

Theme One Motivation • 3
https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2018/05/19/theme-one-motivation-%e2%80%a2-3/

All through the 70s and 80s I spent many interesting hours
hanging out in John Eulenberg's Artificial Language Lab at
Michigan State. The lab did a lot of work on augmentative
communication technology for limited mobility users and the
observations I made there prompted the first inklings of my
Learner program. Early in that period I sat in on his course
in mathematical linguistics, which featured Laws of Form among
its readings(!), along with Wall, Chomsky, Jackendoff, and the
Unified Science volume by Charles Morris that mentioned Peirce
in a favorable light. I learned Zipf's Law relating the lengths
of codes to their usage frequencies and named the earliest avatar
of my Learner “XyPh”, alluding to Zipf and the Xylem and Phloem of
its tree data structures.

To be continued ...

Regards,

Jon

Jon Awbrey

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May 21, 2018, 9:24:31 AM5/21/18
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Backtracking a bit and continuing ...

Theme One Motivation • 4
https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2018/05/20/theme-one-motivation-%e2%80%a2-4/

Speaking of compression, either my present memory or my mind at the time
mushed together two different sorts of 1/f scaling laws under the heading
of Zipf's Law, but the overarching principle here is simply “things that
vary inversely to frequency”. Generally speaking, keeping track of usage
frequencies is part and parcel of building efficient codes.

In it's first application, then, the environment the Learner had to learn was
the usage behavior of its user, as given by finite sequences of characters from
a finite alphabet that we might as well call “words” and by finite sequences of
those words that we might as well call “phrases” or “sentences”. In other words,
the Learner had the job of constructing a “user model”.

In that frame of mind we are not seeking anything so grand as a
Universal Induction Algorithm but simply looking for any approach
that gives us a leg up, complexity wise, in Interactive Real Time.

To be continued ...

joseph simpson

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May 21, 2018, 9:38:56 AM5/21/18
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Interesting material.. very interesting... 

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Jon Awbrey

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May 21, 2018, 6:04:22 PM5/21/18
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Thanks, Joe,

I'll stick with the informal exposition for a while as it's helping me
to remember many details I haven't accessed for a very long time.

I did made a couple of starts over the years at writing up a more formal
documentation of the program. What I've done so far can be reached via
WayBak links at the following location:

• Theme One Program • Commentary (2005)
http://intersci.ss.uci.edu/wiki/index.php/Theme_One_Program#TOP._Theme_One_Program_.E2.80.A2_Commentary_.282005.29

I don't imagine anyone will want to wade through that
so I'll start transcribing the material to this page:

• Theme One Program • Commentary
http://intersci.ss.uci.edu/wiki/index.php/Theme_One_Program_%E2%80%A2_Commentary

Regards,

Jon

On 5/21/2018 9:38 AM, joseph simpson wrote:
> Interesting material... very interesting...
>
> On Mon, May 21, 2018 at 6:24 AM, Jon Awbrey <jaw...@att.net> wrote:
>
>> Sys Sci Group,
>>
>> Backtracking a bit and continuing ...
>>
>> Theme One Motivation • 4
>> https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2018/05/20/theme-one-motivation-%e2%80%a2-4/
Message has been deleted

Jon Awbrey

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May 28, 2018, 8:32:26 AM5/28/18
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Joe, Sys Sci, Ontolog,

It looks like my time will be at the mercy of contractors and realtors for
the rest of the summer but I'll continue with the informal exposition of the
program as I get time. I've gone back to working on the formal documentation,
segmenting the text into individual functions and groups of related functions,
still mostly low-level primitives at this point. The current version is here:

• Theme One Program • Commentary 2005
http://intersci.ss.uci.edu/wiki/index.php/Theme_One_Program_%E2%80%A2_Commentary_2005

Regards,

Jon

On 5/21/2018 6:04 PM, Jon Awbrey wrote:
> Thanks, Joe,
>
> I'll stick with the informal exposition for a while as it's helping me
> to remember many details I haven't accessed for a very long time.
>
> I did make a couple of starts over the years at writing up a more formal

joseph simpson

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May 28, 2018, 9:58:02 AM5/28/18
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Jon:

Thanks, this is excellent background and context.

My time is also constrained until the first of July.

I should have more time to work the software analysis after the first of July.

Take care, be good to yourself and have fun,

Joe


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Jon Awbrey

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May 30, 2018, 9:36:13 AM5/30/18
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A little more background on the Learner side of the Inquiry program:

Theme One Motivation • 5
https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2018/05/30/theme-one-motivation-%e2%80%a2-5/

Given that I’m working from 40-year-old memories about all this I thought
it might be good to peruse the web for current information about Zipf’s Law.
I found there is also something called the Zipf–Mandelbrot (and sometimes
–Pareto) Law and that was interesting because my wife Susan Awbrey used
Mandelbrot’s ideas about self-similarity in her dissertation and
communicated with him about it. So more to read up on …

Just off-hand, though, I think my Learner is dealing with a different problem.
It has more to do with the savings in effort a learner gets from anticipating
future experience based on its record of past experience than the savings it gets
from minimizing bits of storage as far as mechanically possible. There is still
a type of compression involved but it’s more like Korzybski’s* “time-binding” than
space-saving proper. (*Speaking of old memories …)

The other difference I see is that Zipf’s Law applies to an established
and preferably large corpus of linguistic material, while my Learner has
to start from scratch, accumulating experience over time while doing the
best it can with whatever data it may have in the beginning and every
given moment thereafter.

joseph simpson

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May 30, 2018, 11:39:07 AM5/30/18
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Jon:

Thanks for the additional commentary.

The core benefits, that I see,  associated with an approach like Theme One are:
 -- Graphical representation of concepts (need to determine if the prose representation and graphic representation are isomorphic)
 -- Logical inference from existing information content.
 -- Ability to learn about a specific area.

Opens up the possibility to automatically analyze large volumes of data associated with an area of interest.
The automatic analysis has the capability to reduce cost and increase the performance of human decision makers.

Take care, be good to yourself and have fun,

Joe


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Jon Awbrey

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Jun 2, 2018, 10:40:16 PM6/2/18
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Theme One Motivation • 6
https://inquiryintoinquiry.com/2018/06/02/theme-one-motivation-%e2%80%a2-6/

Sys Sci Group,

Comments I made in reply to a correspondent’s questions about delimiters and tokenizing
in the Learner module may be worth sharing here.

As a part of my Master’s work in psychology I applied my program to a few samples of data
from my advisor’s funded research study on family interactions. In one phase of the study
observers viewed video-taped sessions of family members (parent and child) interacting in
various modes (play or work) and coded qualitative features of each moment’s activity over
a period of time.

The following page describes the application in more detail and reflects on its implications
for the conduct of scientific inquiry in general.

• Exploratory Qualitative Analysis of Sequential Observation Data
http://intersci.ss.uci.edu/wiki/index.php/Exploratory_Qualitative_Analysis_of_Sequential_Observation_Data

In this application a “word” or “string” is a fixed-length sequence of qualitative features
and a “sentence” or “strand” is a sequence of words that ends with what the observer judges
to be a significant pause in activity.

In the qualitative research phases of the study one is simply attempting to discern any
significant or recurring patterns in the data one possibly can.

In this case the observers are tokenizing the observations according to a codebook that has
passed enough intercoder reliability studies to afford them all a measure of confidence it
captures meaningful aspects of whatever reality is passing before their eyes and ears.

joseph simpson

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Jun 2, 2018, 11:27:34 PM6/2/18
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Jon:

Every interesting.

I believe that this example of your work demonstrates what Warfield said, in "A Science of Generic Design," page 47:

"On the other hand, the attributes of natural language differ from those of formal languages. Thus it can be presently conjectured and ultimately can be demonstrated that careful design of an object language can be augmented, with natural language serving as a metalanguage, to produce a very powerful means of achieving high-quality communication and documentation."

Warfield proposed a range of basic and composite language types for systems science and engineering.

Take care, be good to yourself and have fun,

Joe


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Jon Awbrey

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Dec 7, 2018, 2:00:17 PM12/7/18
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Theme One • A Program Of Inquiry : 17



Re: Ontolog Forum • (1)
Re: Systems Science • (1)
Re: Laws Of Form • (1)(2)(3) • (4)


The move is all over but the unpacking, and the time looks ripe to pick up this thread from last spring.  Here, by way of a quick refresher, are a few Tables from earlier discussions.

  • Theme One • A Program Of Inquiry : 11
    • Tables 1 and 2 illustrate the existential and entitative interpretations of cactus graphs and cactus expressions by means of English translations for a few of the most basic forms.
Regards,

Jon
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