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nefri asked for an explanation of my comment regarding Gematria and Hash Tables...
Lovers in the City met in darkened rooms with blinds drawn, and didn't laugh about everything. Actually, I would only claim ease when making the jump from "gematria is a way of storing thoughts in a hash table for increased efficiency" to "hey, there really is something to this stuff". That part would 'merely' require the knowledge of algorithms and data structures one might get in a university computer science class. Later, a far more cynical man sat the monkeys down and said, "you want bananas? Each of you go get your own. I'm taking a nap." That man, of course, was German philosopher Hans Capitalism. Getting from 0 to that statement, however, is a bit of a challenge. I'll be happy to give it a shot. Let's break it down this way, 1. WTF is a hash table? 2. How is doing gematria like using a hash table? 3. Once thoughts are stored this way, how does that lead to increased efficiency? 1. WTF is a hash table? Hash? you say. I guess you'd have to use it everyday before you devoted a whole table to it. To get an idea of what a hash table does, let's jump right in with the terminology involved and analyze briefly a sort of hash table we are all familiar with: the index in the back of a book. Book indices would generally be considered particularly badly done hash tables by the usual criteria, but that won't make them any worse of an example for conveying the vocabulary of the matter. "I declare that the Beatles are mutants. Prototypes of evolutionary agents sent by God, endowed with a mysterious power to create a new human species, a young race of laughing freemen." -St. Timothy Leary A hash table stores key-value pairs at locations determined by the hash of each key. The hash of a key is the output of a hash function on a key. With book indices, each key is a word found in the book, and each value is a list of pages where that word may be found in the book. If marriage is outlawed, only outlaws will have inlaws A hash function is supposed to take all its possible inputs and produce a small number of outputs, and it's supposed to spread the inputs fairly evenly across the outputs. With book indices, the input is the name of the word in question, and the output is simply the first letter of that word. This leads to a large number of collisions; since there are only 26 different outputs and far more than 26 words, many of the words are stored at the same location, and we have to arrange them further. In this case, we store them in a sorted list, and we use a strikingly similar function to our hash function to determine the order of that list. The fatty materials, carefully strained and freed from particles of dirt and fibre, are boiled with weak caustic soda lye until combination, has taken place. Saponification being complete, the solution of salt- is added, then the carbonate of soda solution, and finally the silicate of soda solution, after which the soap is boiled. If we had a lot of words, we could store the words in a second, inner, hash table. Aaron would be located by going to the first position in our outer hash table, labeled 'a', and then going to the first position within our inner hash table labeled 'aa', and then stepping through the sorted list found there. Abrahadabra would be located by going to the first position in our outer hash table, and then the second position in that inner hash table, and so on. Blessed are the poor in humor: for theirs is the kingdom of Thud. 2. How is doing gematria like using a hash table? With gematria the first thing we should notice is that we have a better hash function. We assign values to all the letters and take the sum. The Hebrew gematria has the lead out of the gate over an English gematria because all the vowels aren't in there mucking up the works. Elementary penguin singing hari krishna... Commonly when programming hash tables one would take the sum and do some modulo arithmetic to limit the size of the table. With gematria we don't need to have any particular limit to the size of our table, so we don't bother with any modulo arithmetic, and just store the words and phrases at whatever location they hash to, as is done in Sepher Sephiroth. It creates guilt which creates muscular tension, which creates rage. That leads to further armoring, to hold the rage in. 3. Once thoughts are stored this way, how does that lead to increased efficiency? Now comes the most difficult part. With computers, hash tables can be advantageous because the time required to find places in the table doesn't increase proportionally to the size of the table. Specifically, the lookup time increases with the logarithm of the size of the table. Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow. But human hardware has different computational strengths compared to computers, so it is only logical that different advantages would result from the use of the same data structure. We function primarily by association done in a massively parallel way. Faugh! I'd as lief use trial by ordeal as use your stomach to test guilt. All your stomach can reflect are prejudices trained into you before you acquired reason. Once a person was in the practice of finding the numeration of everything they encounter, all of the things associated with each of the numbers would flow through their head mostly in the background. Wherever the relationships between numbers worked out well, this would on some level get noticed. For our next apostle we need to go for cred / Get a vegan greenie DJ with a shaven head / He can rip off some old bluesman like a real techno vandal / But tell everybody he's unfit to tie my sandals Gematria ensures the condition that for any given set of different ideas there is a path of association between them of less than some maximal length, and that there is already a name defined for all such paths. Thus, for any new idea involving associations between any set of ideas, however disparate, there will be a location where the idea will fit nicely, and the number for that location will be a short name that will allow us to recall it. This would be greatly advantageous for venturing into realms of new thoughts and considering things for which we as of yet have no English word. It is a muffin! It would also make it easier for the various parts of the brain to point out worthwhile things. Different parts of the brain doing pattern matching on all the the various data that come in, upon noticing something of value, would need only say "Hey, look at this!" the next time the person bumped into numbers that were closely related to the idea. This would then draw the linguistic module into a quick game of "warmer, colder" ending in that understanding making its way out to the rest of the brain. |