Saturday, April 28, 2007

Relating Stars to Human Knowledge

Last night I was out for a workshop and there post dinner we all were interacting and sharing our ideas and thoughts what interests us. After some time for some reason I separated myself out of the crowd and was back into the thought process which I like to get into. I was looking at the sky and then all I could see was stars. Some bright and some not so bright. This triggered a thought as do they also represent the way knowledge is stored in human brain? This post relates back to the previous post where I put my thoughts about a Self Learning Systems. In this post we will discuss about how the knowledge can be accumulated over a period of time.

The accessibility of any piece of information in our brain has a factor of when it happened or when in past we came across the incident. Like the stars in the sky, there are few bright ones and few not so bright ones. Each star appears to us with a different intensity and brightness. The one which appears brightest among them are the ones who are closer to us. The classic example is Sun. Same way the things which we remember easily and better are the events which happened in recent past and as they day passess by our memories of the same also starts to fade.

Another similarity of Knowledge and Stars is their lifecycle. The stars are born, they grow to their peak capacity and then they die and become a dwarf star or black hole. The similar things happen to our knowledge and learning as well. We Learn and the knowledge stays with us for a while and after sometime it fades away (if we don't use it) and vanishes. But as it happens with stars they get transformed into a dwarf or black hole, the knowledge we accumulate moves to a non-accessible or not so easily accessible location in our brain. But it never vanishes. It remains there.

The advantage of using a computer system here is that we have access to all those details uniformly no matter how old they are and when they were used last. In the last post of mine when I talked about the Self Learning System, I mentioned about the able to learn from user input. The system must ensure that the knowledge, data, query result etc are accessible with a reference to when was that acquired and when was it used last (with an option to view the log as how many times the same piece of knowledge was used).

How can this be made possible? This is the million dollar question one will ask? Well to answer that we need the following:
  1. A computer program to capture the User input Query.
  2. A Service to query and retrieve all the different possible ways to solve the problem from available vendors or service providers.
  3. A mechanism to store the query criteria, output and the reasoning used to arrive at the result for future purposes.
  4. A mechanism to log the actions in the system and show them to the user when the need arises.
In next few posts I will attempt to draw an architecture of how this kind of system may look like.

Until Next Time... :)

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