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<p class="MsoNormal"><span>Occam’s Razor and
Venture Capital</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span>Arturo’s homepage is
very instructive. The figure of a medieval scholar and innovator springs to
mind. Pedro has, in our long history, repeatedly referred to the school of Salamanca as the interdisciplinary
centre of European intellectuality. We live in historic times (not only in
matters of information theory).</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span>To have a
self-employed creative mind, interdisciplinary thinker, in our midst, is one
more of the encouraging turns this august society has taken over the years. As
a self-employed clinical psychologist on the very edge of retiring, in Vienna,
this person may put forward an idea that needs the competence of the membership
of FIS.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span>Let us return to Occam’s
razor. The idea is that between two possible explanations that one is to be
preferred, which is simpler. Wiki: "A hypothesis with fewer adjustable
parameters will automatically have an enhanced posterior probability, due to
the fact that the predictions it makes are sharp."</span><sup id="gmail-cite_ref-Jefferys_33-1"><span lang="DE-AT"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor#cite_note-Jefferys-33">[33]</a></span></sup></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><cite><span style="font-family:"calibri",sans-serif">Jefferys,
William H.; Berger, James O. (1991). </span></cite><cite><span style="font-family:"calibri",sans-serif" lang="DE-AT"><a href="http://quasar.as.utexas.edu/papers/ockham.pdf"><span lang="EN-GB">"Ockham's Razor and Bayesian Statistics
(preprint available as "Sharpening Occam's Razor on a Bayesian
Strop")"</span></a></span></cite><cite><span style="font-family:"calibri",sans-serif" lang="DE-AT"> </span></cite><cite><span style="font-size:10pt;line-height:107%;font-family:"calibri",sans-serif">(PDF)</span></cite><cite><span style="font-family:"calibri",sans-serif">. </span></cite><cite><span style="font-family:"calibri",sans-serif" lang="DE-AT"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Scientist" title="American Scientist">American Scientist</a>. <b>80</b>: 64–72</span></cite><sup><span lang="DE-AT"></span></sup></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span>You are invited to
cooperate in the project of building mankind’s first numeric Occam machine.
This is a huge database, conceptually comparable to all trigonometric values,
or – in a different approach – to the Online Encyclopaedia of Integer
Sequences. It is huge task for one individual, but a task force of 1-2
programmers, 1-2 mathematicians and 1 user interface manager can have a very
nice working system, not only for personal use, but accessible and living, in a
few days, maybe weeks. The sense of such a general Table of Movements is to enable
users to build their successive tables that answer their individual questions. The
rhetorical task is not enviable, as one tries to sell the idea of building a
tool that helps users to look up answers to their questions, if – as it is at
the present moment unquestionably so – the prospective users do not yet know
that they need these data to verify or falsify their questions. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span>At this point, FIS
comes in. The rhetoric task does have a fighting chance of getting attention, because
the composition of the audience is wide, faceted enough; by coming from so many
different backgrounds we have a perspective of global approach to information theory.
The invention that transforms theory into a technological procedure does have a
marketable value. Unfortunately, although information shows itself, it is very
elusive, so we can’t present a prototype like Diesel, not even seeds like
Mendel. The principle is here also of novelty value and can be expressed
towards politicians and businessmen in simple words, vale Occam, like e.g.:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span>“We had difficulties
understanding information because we have had a blind spot in our education. We
were so much fascinated by the ideas of equality, similarity, uniformity and
replaceability that we have between the lines discouraged research into the
positions of the logical arguments in a logical sentence. Some Spanish professor
has assembled an informal interdisciplinary community of nerds, over 20 years
ago. They have now come up with an idea that seems to have some merit. The idea
is to picture logical conflicts within a logical system which is of course traditionally
a no-no. They figured out that we in fact exist only always a third of the time
in each of three planes (front, across, up) in a logically sound fashion. By that
trick, there is an accounting continuity from the sequence to the more-dimensional
object. It fits ideally well with the numbers. They figured this out by sorting
and ordering simple expressions like a+b=c, and watching the patterns of
displacements while being reordered from an order into a different one. Pure
Occam, a solid explanation built on sorting natural numbers between 1 and 16.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span>Such an expose could
make some interesting response. Let me hope that Occam’s followers find their
common interest in presenting a development by FIS of a computer-ready project
that advances science. Such a project is a Christmas present for any decision
maker, because he can understand that discovering the importance of a small
detail and using the information contained in the sequences can be no wrong.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span>Let me respectfully
ask the dear FIS if anyone is about to begin contemplating whether to show some
interest in hosting the first interactive version of a tautomat. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span>Thank you for your
attention.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span>Karl</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><span> </span></b></p>
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