At 17:48 +0200 06/03/2002, Michael von Aichberger wrote:
>Suppose I told you to look in a supermarket for all products that are a
>fruit and that are yellow.
>
>If you happen to have a banana in your hands, can you decide if it fits the
>selection at first sight or would you have to go through all products again?
You do understand, I hope, that what you are speaking of here is
pattern recognition, and computers are completely incapable of such a
subtle and sophisticated concept. At the very least a robot carrying
a banana would have to recognize that fruit AND yellow happens to
match what it's currently got -- so it would not have to search again
-- but that's an issue of semantics and nothing more. Because it had
to, at some point or another, either:
1. Be handed a banana by someone else; or
2. Locate and retrieve the banana itself as part of a previous
search function.
In either case it would still have to run its DB to make sure that
what it was currently holding matched the criteria. (if heldObject =
"yellow" and heldObject = "fruit" then...)
What you're wanting to do is -- if I understand correctly -- have a
kind of internal, intuitive index of all possible items. You can
approach that with a database, but you are still going to have to
create search fields for users to employ; or perhaps it would be more
useful to think of them as a sophisticated series of interconnected
toggle switches instead.
Then you're just getting access to data handles rather than searching
(though I'm still not sure there's a real distinction as far as the
computer is concerned), but before you can do even that, you've got
to construct things in such a way that what the users want can be got
in the first place.
--
Warren Ockrassa | http://www.nightwares.com/
Director help | Free files | Sample chapters | Freelance | Consulting
Author | Director 8.5 Shockwave Studio: A Beginner's Guide
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