It's all going to end in tears, or perhaps OUR BRAINS CRASHING

[major_clanger]

via Metafilter, an intriguing paper on efforts to come up with a way of coding logic problems into diagrams that exploit the capabilities of the visual cortex to instantly process them.

In my humble opinion the author is either a superlative crackpot or a genius.* I rather hope he's the former, because if he is onto something then as a couple of Metafilter commentators noted he's heading off towards inventing the Langford Basilisk.

Either that, or he's going to get a non-negotiable invitation to join the Laundry.

*A feeling I also had after reading Julian Jaynes's The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, which of course was one of the main inspirations for Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, itself featuring the eponymous information virus that is yet another Mind Hack of Death.

Comments

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Is it dangerous to click on the link that leads to the paper?

[quercus.livejournal.com]

Yes. My head hurts now.

Looking at those diagrams is actually painful.

[non-trivial.livejournal.com]

Yep, Snow Crash and BLIT were the two things that immediately sprang to my mind as well - perhaps the paper should be viewed through a distorting mirror?

[pjc50.livejournal.com]

The idea is brilliant, but I think he's going down the wrong approach. I'd have thought the way to go is using the ability of the brain to classify into "noise" and "pattern", or at least targetting 3SAT or similar. Whereas _evaluating_ large piles of Boolean logic is already trivial in silicon hardware. What we want is something that uses "intuition" to find solutions to problems which would otherwise require expensive enumeration.

[purplecthulhu.livejournal.com]

Maybe... but this would mean that when he encodes the incompleteness theorem or something more dangerous into the images you don't go blind but instead your intuition crashes, which is likely to be much worse :-)