GNU mathematics community

Hi guys, this seems to be a nice forum. This morning I woke up with some interesting thoughts that I would like to share with you all. Hope some interesting and fun discussion will come from this.

GNU mathematics - math with a sense of humour

As we now reach a situation in the open source community where there is an abundance of distributed ledgers under development, matematicians of all kinds could have a field day making them all communicate with eachother.

I propose we create a forum of people who are geeky natural scientists with a sense of humour. Let me explain what I mean by humour in this context!

When I was in my teens some twenty years ago, my uncle who is a civil engineer gave me a book that would change my thinking forever - The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Addams.

Until that day I had been kind of a serious child. I learned in kindergarden that the world was under great threats from nuclear wars and environmental problems of all kinds. For these reasons I was afraid.

After reading the book a kind of lightheartedness appeared in me. The sense of humour given to us by Douglas Addams has a geeky quality that comes from a deep and somewhat distanced understanding of the complexities of nature.

My uncle also gave me one more piece of information that I have carried with me since my teenage years - the Tit for Tat strategy. He gave me an article about a contest that had been set up between programmers. The contest was about creating algorithms for solving the prisoners dilemma. According to the article the Tit for Tat strategy always won the contests. The strategy is very simple: always co-operate unless you meet someone that did not co-operate with you on your last encounter. In this case the strategy says not to co-operate - on this one occasion. The next time you meet this same individual however - you co-operate again.

I propose we create a community that has the addamsian sense of humour and the Tit for Tat strategy as the two fundamental guidelines. Into the community every one who wants to contribute is welcome.

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Let us learn OWL together by writing just a tiny piece of formal code in collobaration! Any one who feels it is meaningful to contribute is very welcome to do that. It is fine to contribute just by asking questions about how to do things and also to demand explanations for certain choices that the authors make.

The aim of this short piece of code is to formally describe how a “thing” can be created from “nothing”.

We limit our selves to the use of only the integer numbers ranging from 1 to 9 combined with the “nothing” and “thing” classes of OWL. In commentary and in the choices of names for different variables we can use any words we know.

When we think about how to solve this problem, let us be inspired by thoughts about what is called “the hard problem of philosophy”!

In this we describe the problem as the following:

Nothing -> Qualia -> Thing

This can be understood as the process by which a mind picks up different qualities of an object to decide what kind of an object it is. Since this is a creative mind we can say that it creates the thing by understanding what is is.

To begin playing with this problem let us denote nine cubes that have the sides n = (1…9) where these numbers refer to the number of elements of “nothing”.

The first cube has the side 1. We say it is black; we call it “do”.
Second cube has the side of 2 and we say it is purple; we call it “re”.
Third cube has the side of 3 and it is indigo; we call it “mi”.
Fourth cube has the side of 4 and is blue; we call it “fa”.
Fifth cube green; we call it “so”.
Sixth cube yellow: called “la”.
Seventh cube orange; ti.
Eigth cube red; to.
Nineth cube white; silence.

These nine cubes we call the pallette.

Now we have nine cubes that can be used to create images in 3d. These images can be drawn into a sphere that has the radius r. R is decided depending of how fine a resolution we want in the images. Perhaps r = 100 000 is a good choice?

Now how can we create some computer art out of this?