LinkShare #1 — Wolfram Models and Cognitive Science

A few years ago Stephen Wolfram announced The Wolfram Physics Project. An effort to model fundamental physics with hypergraph transformations (hypergraphs are graph networks whose nodes have any number of connections, not just 2) . There’s a space of rules describing what a particular hypergraph structure can become, and it turns out you can model physics by analyzing the changes in state after each application of all possible rules. The graph of this evolution is called a multiway system, and researchers are beginning to investigate where this infrastructure can be applied in their own fields. Having gone through a Cognitive Science program which discussed formal systems and grammars (i.e. systems with rules describing transformations) it’s easy to see the potential the Wolfram Model has in the areas of semantics, thought, and language. Where the physics project describes atoms of space, I’m really interested in atoms of thought. This discussion (linked below) from yesterday between two forward thinking researchers covers how multiway systems might apply to artificial intelligence and models of mind.

Multiway Systems as Models to understand the Mind and Universe