As Google searches through information, can we devise an engine that searches through concepts?

I want to share some thoughts here, on how we could create a conceptual space of all possible combinations of matter and mechanism, of all possible objects, and search through them for useful designs. As an example, let me transport one object through such a conceptual space - from maritime history to the space age.

Let me put it very simply first: metaphors are like hyperlinks in your mind palace.

Compass, Cannon, Conveyor Belt

The cannons employed in war, on land or on sea, often came equipped with a gunner’s compass. Perfect angling of the muzzle would ensure that that cannonball, under the parabolic curve of gravity ( also called projectile motion ), would fall on its distant target. The video game Angry Birds is a good illustration of this geometry.

What use could be a gunner’s compass in a small space ship, the future equivalent of a freight truck? With enough accuracy and low gravity, we could eject cargo from one ship and throw it to be received by another at slow velocity, like a conveyor belt in space. Except, there is no belt.

Not a great invention, but what we’ve created is essentially a metaphorical mechanics. In conceptual space, metaphors perform the function that hyperlinks do on the world wide web, they connect one concept to another. Multiple metaphors emanate from any given concept and link to other concepts through multiple pathways. This topological space can be searched by a hybrid intelligence - human and algorithmic.

Take another problem which can scale from sea to space. Sailors in the night, wondering which one of the many lighthouses in the distance denotes the port of their destination. A metaphorical mechanics may have been employed by Charles Babbage while proposing a solution. He gave numbers to lighthouses, communicated by the blinking of lights, using the same mathematical codes as used in telegraphy.

We want to look inside this ecology of materials and ideas, and how they lead to one another. Scientific instruments and devices are also concepts, and have their own genealogy, evolution and social life like a species of vertebrate animals, insects or radiolaria. They can be seen as a genus who have their own ecology and commerce.

Fritz Zwicky is better known as the astronomer who coined the term “dark matter”, but he was a man of varied interests. One of these he called morphological analysis, which is a way of taking a finite number of concepts and mixing them up, quite promiscuously - to create many new concepts - a kind of conceptual alchemy, if you will.

Bombastic as always, Zwicky wrote:

While the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Arabs, the Incas, the Germanic races and others each had their individual style of life which pervaded their art, science, statecraft and daily activities, their respective styles do not seem to have been consciously known to them. The prediction may here be ventured that if we or our successors are destined to achieve a new style, it will be a conscious style for the first time in history. Its essence will be the knowledge of a basic totality of things, a basic totality at least as far as the determining parameters are known to us. Later generations may learn to know additional parameters, and progress thus never comes to an end. The prediction is, that if the earth and humanity are going to survive at all, the next cultural style will be that of the age of morphology. We shall call morphology the study of the basic patterns of things. Morphology, we claim, is going to be the prime symbol of the activities of modern man in the near future.

This is very reminiscent of Hermann Hesse’s novel Das Glasperlenspiel ( or ‘the glass bead game’) where a similar game is played in order to concoct a “synthesis of all human knowledge”.

One of the primary quests in the 9-month online workshop The Age of Re:Discovery will be to design and implement such a game engine. You are welcome to join us on this adventure.

[Image: A Dutch-Whaler Close-hauled in a Breeze painting by Claesz Rietschoof 1651-1719]