abstract
| - It starts as a craze. With ever cheaper computing power, and terabytes of portable storage, people are recording everything and anything. It's not long before someone hooks up a subvocal recorder to their 'iPod', along with a primitive precursor of what will in time become an AI Neural Interface and downloading the capture daily to a more powerful computer for analysis.
* But what to make of the huge quantities of data captured? Conventional data mining software is only able to present a fraction of the many links and correlations that could be uncovered. A solution comes from an unlikely quarter. Graphical software for analysis of biochemical pathways.
* The mind maps produced show connections. They share something of the quality of primitive paper based mind maps, hence the name. However, they are different by orders of magnitude. The images are dense, complex, dynamic flowing diagrams, just as advanced computer biochemical pathway diagrams are. You can 'follow an idea' along a pathway, seeing how it transforms and changes, seeing how it interacts with other ideas. You can label an idea cluster, and then see how that 'label' spreads through the system. You can change the background conditions, and see how the system reacts as a whole. All very pretty, but what are they useful for?
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