COMPUTING AS COMPRESSION

Too blue for logic

My axioms were so clean-hewn,
The joins of 'thus' and 'therefore' neat
But, I admit
Life would not fit
Between straight lines
And all the cornflowers said was 'blue,'
All summer long, so blue.
So when the sea came in and with one wave
Threatened to wash my edifice away -
I let it.

Marianne Jones

INTRODUCTION

STOP PRESS: New book about the SP theory and its applications.

Details of relevant publications are given below. Copies of most of them may be obtained by clicking on the highlighted title.

There is now a mail list for discussion of Computing as Compression and related topics, kindly set up and maintained by Chuck Carlson ().

OVERVIEW

The SP theory aims to integrate and simplify a range of concepts in artificial 'computing' and natural 'cognition'. The key idea idea in the theory is compression of information by the matching and unification of patterns.

A relatively short and informal account of the theory is provided in Information compression and multiple alignment as unifying concepts in AI and computing. At more length, Information compression by multiple alignment, unification and search as a unifying principle in computing and cognition provides an overview of the theory and its applications, with details of publications.

Information compression means increasing the Simplicity of a body of information (by removing redundancy) and, at the same time, preserving as much as possible of its non-redundant descriptive Power. Hence the name 'SP'.

The name 'ICMAUS', which has previously been used as an alternative name for the theory, has now been dropped.

PUBLICATIONS

Most of the publications from this section may be obtained as a PDF, Postscript or MS Word file.

The articles that give the best overall view of the research programme and the SP framework are marked with . For readers who are not previously acquainted with this field, these are the articles to start with. For convenience, they are listed here in a suggested order for reading:

• Overview.
• Background thinking.
• Articles about syntax, parsing and production of natural language.
• Probabilistic reasoning in the SP framework.
• 'Computing' as information compression.
• Unsupervised learning.

Some of the articles have an HTML version which can be read with any standard Web browser. Many thanks to Chuck Carlson () for doing the conversions.

A word of caution about printing: it is probably best to print articles from the PDF,  Postscript or MS Word version. Printing from HTML versions of the articles may put page breaks in awkward places and, in two articles which are marked, some of the diagrams are too wide for ordinary paper.

If you have comments on any of these papers, I would be glad to hear - please get in touch. Or you may like to subscribe to the mail list for discussion of Computing as Compression and related topics.

Publications topics:

• Overview
• Natural language processing
• Probabilistic reasoning
• Pattern recognition (including medical diagnosis viewed as pattern recognition)
• Interpreting computing, mathematics and logic within the SP framework
• Medical applications
• Applications in the Semantic Web
• Unsupervised learning
• Realisation of the SP framework with neural mechanisms
• Software engineering
• Databases and information retrieval
• Background
• Conference papers about the SP framework
• Miscellaneous articles relating to the SP framework
• Early work

BOOK

Ebook cover	Print edition cover

Description of the book

Ordering the book

SLIDE SHOW

UNIFYING AI

This talk was presented at ECAI2002. If you would like me to give a version of this talk, please get in touch.

TUTORIAL

SP TUTORIAL.ZIP (720 KB)

This half-day tutorial was given at ES2002. If you would like me to give a similar tutorial, please get in touch. It may be possible to save time and costs by using Netmeeting and the Internet.

SOURCE CODE

If you wish to see the exact workings of the SP62 model or experiment with it, the source code and a Windows executable is available in the file SP62.ZIP. An alternative implementation, kindly developed by Tichomir Tenev, is available in SP61_TT.ZIP.

The source code for the SP70 model is available in SP70.ZIP. This model needs some reorganisation. Since it contains the main components of SP62 as a subset, it is probably best to look at SP62 first.

Please note: these programs are for research, they are not shrink-wrapped software packages that you might buy from a shop. I have released them mainly for people who want to dig around inside them and see what is going on.

This software is released to the public domain without any restrictions, but please read the notice on the source files.

 Last updated: 2007-03-05 (ISO 8601)