[om-list] Re: Hello

[Tom and other Packers]

Mark

    Everything's going fine.  There are some difficulties with Megan's
parents, who are not LDS, but nothing we can't handle.  We are thinking
about this date, as it is the first day of a long break from school,
surrounding the Olympics: 2002.02.02.

    I've been getting so many ideas regarding machine learning and inductive
inference that I don't know what to do with them all.  I haven't the time to
implement an eighth of them.  They just keep coming.  Every time I implement
one idea, and I see how it isn't perfect, I get a few more ideas.  (So far,
I've implemented three simple cluster analysis or multi-model
classification-integration type algorithms.)  It's a combinatorial explosion
of ideas -- or it would be if I didn't have such a finite mind.  I'm not
sure if I should be happy about this or sad.  I want to at least make record
of the ideas, in a simple, high-level description of them, so I don't lose
any of them, which I will start doing.  But ... if I could just have three
full time programmers who did only what I told them, I would be happy.  Just
a dream.

    For example, I've decided that for studies as complex and big and
partially repetitive and partially unique and knowledge-intensive as the
studies we do at Thoughtform, a whole new design in software would be useful
(don't tell Dan :-), something similar to a whole OS full of little
knowledge-processing functions, and a shell scripting language to drive it,
like in Unix, but a system that is "specialised" for general knowledge
modelling and inference programming.  That would be so cool.

    (Mark, how similar might this programming language be to the one you
want to write?  Probably not very.  This one would be rather high-level,
like Lisp and Prolog.  But, ... I may ask you if you'd like to think about
helping me write a language some time.  It would probably be called MPL: the
"Mathetical Programming Language".)

    So, I'm going to start moving towards this goal, incrementally and
immediately, since not only would it be good for TF, it would be very
similar to what I had in mind for Informatica and OM, and I could make a
senior research project out of parts of it.

    But, I better talk to the OM group and figure out how all of us might
keep trying to help each other.

    Questions:  Will it be hard to integrate what I'm developing on the
Win32 platform with our OM stuff on Linux?  Should I just try to start
developing things in Linux now, even though it would be harder to integrate
it with Thoughtform's TFStudio.exe?  And should I feel constrained to follow
OM's database file format, or should I/we write a translator?

    ciao,
tomp

----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark Butler" <butlerm at home.middle.net>
To: "Tom Packer" <tomp at middle.net>
Sent: Friday, August 24, 2001 7:41 AM
Subject: Hello


Hi Tom,

  How is everything going?  Have you set a date yet?

I am not doing anything too exciting, just the advanced merge program and a
couple of other things.  I have been quite effective lately in my mission to
convert the world from Windows servers to Linux servers, however.

I am excited for you and hope all is well.


   - Mark