Re: [ontolog-forum] What words mean

[Pat Hayes <phayes@xxxxxxx>]

At 12:01 PM +0700 2/16/08, paola.dimaio@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

> John and all
> >
> > The web may be large and complex, but it is definitely
> > *not* random
>
> can we agree on 'chaotic'  instead,
> which is my interpretation of what 'random' was intended to purport in
> the context of this discussion

'Chaotic' means that the final state of a system depends on arbitrarily small changes to its input. The Web isn't chaotic in this sense. I wouldn't say that the Web is chaotic in any informal sense of the word, either. Messy, it may well be. Fortunately, 'messy' hasn't yet got a technical meaning.

I believe, from reading his other posts, that Rob really did mean random in the technical sense, and that what he might have meant was there there was some randomness in it, analogously to noise added to a signal. I think Rob's theory of English is that it contains such noise inherently.

Pat

> pdm
>
>  
> > in any sense; almost every page on the web can be compacted by a
> > large fraction; and the entire web contains an enormous amount of
> > duplication that would permit great compaction if anybody wanted
> > to spend the time and money to do so.
> >
> > To demonstrate that point, download a typical web page and try
> > compacting it using any compression program on your computer
> > (ZIP, although not great, is usually available).
> >
> > If you're using Windows, you can also open any zipped directory,
> > use the details view, and note the percentage compression of each
> > file.  A text file is typically compressed to less than a third
> > of
> > its original size, but diagrams are usually compressed much less
> > because most of them have already been compressed.
> >
> > John
> >
> --
> Paola Di Maio
> School of IT
> www.mfu.ac.th
> *********************************************
>  
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