Random Matrix

Now then, have you ever wondered what’s up with our known, sensed, and observed reality – have you ever considered that it all started with a simple plan, or a simple set of rules, much like particle physics, chemistry, and computer algorithms? It’s not really a deep thought, more of a “what if” along the lines of Western Philosophy debates on fate and free choice. Let me take this conversation to a more interesting place for a moment.

Recently, I read an interesting research paper titled; “Exploring Hidden Connections Among Historical Images,” by Wu Zheng of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Now then, in this research paper the abstract postulates to potential to develop and experiment to;

“explore hidden connections among historical images using literature-based discovery (LBD) method. The result of the experiment shows that LBD has the potential in finding implicit relations among these images.”

Okay so, do you remember the scene in the Matrix where the main character was in a stairwell, and noticed a cat, the same cat twice, and he said; “that’s odd” and the others immediately asked him what he saw, and then they knew that the Matrix had an anomaly meaning the Mr. Smith group was coming.

Now then, if we take a look at all the terrain on Earth, erosion patterns, rock formations, ocean waves, craters, and other features, and then just like using FRT or facial recognition software, we look for such anomalies, what will we find? Do we dare to ask, or will we find there are underlining patterns in everything, almost as if nature itself is running simple algorithms one on top of another, intersecting, thus, appearing random but it isn’t?

What if we took some pages out of Steven Wolfram’s “A New Type of Science” and played around with those simple algorithms and a few mathematical concepts – would we soon learn that hacking nature is as easy as hacking the Matrix? Can we use such data set discoveries to estimate chemical and compound make-ups, estimate atmospheric content, or use this information to help us make sense of less-than-perfect camera picture definition, perhaps even with digital pictures using long range telescopes of other planets and their moons?

Even if we find little if any correlation, at least at first due to our limited computational ability, what we do learn has endless applications for Big Data exploits in science, on the internet, and with predicting what is, or the probability of what will be, should be, or could be; and even if we fail to unlock the secrets of reality, perhaps we can use the data from such a strategy to recreate a near perfect simulation, thus, merging our virtual world with the real one, one of our choosing. Please consider all this on mathematical, computational, and philosophical basis – think on it.