One of the long term goals I've been thinking about is the petamachine problem. Given a machine with a THz of cpu, a TByte of memory, a Petabyte of storage, and an OC5 data link how would you use it to improve computational math research?
One of the subideas is that all of the mathematics that has ever been published would probably fit on a few terabytes of disk space. And any new mathematics would be available in a streaming electronic form. Part of the cpu would be dedicated to watching the newly arriving stream and classifying the information in ways that I personally find useful. I've muttered about expanding the latex tags to have \idea, \concept, etc. so that newly born papers could be more easily classified. However, a new technology seems to make that less interesting. It's called topic modeling. See http://blogs.zdnet.com/emergingtech?p=304 Given a continuous process that scans incoming papers you could add them to a semantic network which models information that I find useful and in ways that I find useful. Axiom could strongly benefit from such technology if we could find a good source of technical papers. Starting from an initial source we could collect electronic conference papers and classify them. Then Axiom could just look up a concept like "Groebner Basis", follow it to "Homological Algebra" then onto "Computing P-modules" and then onto finding an algorithm for computing a presentation of a finitely generated P-module. Ideally the paper would be literate and contain code that was automatically incorporated into the system. The Crystal idea has a facet that constantly watches the user interaction, maintians an "intensional stance" of the user, and tries to find related, relevant work. This technology would be ideal behind such a facet. Automatic classification algorithms are always more effective in limited domains (e.g. math) than in unspecified domains. Sounds like an NSF or INRIA grant idea to me. Tim _______________________________________________ Axiom-developer mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/axiom-developer
