Transparallel
processing by hyperstrings
Peter A. van der
Helm
Abstract.
Human vision research aims at understanding the brain processes that
enable
us to see the world as a structured whole consisting of separate
objects.
To explain how humans organize a visual pattern, structural information
theory starts from the idea that our visual system prefers the
organization
with the simplest descriptive code, that is, the code that captures a
maximum
of visual regularity. Empirically, structural information theory gained
support from psychological data on a wide variety of perceptual
phenomena, but theoretically, the computation of guaranteed simplest
codes remained
a troubling problem. Here, the graph-theoretical concept of
"hyperstrings"
is presented as a key to the solution of this problem. A hyperstring is
a distributed data structure that allows a search for regularity in O(2N)
strings as if only one string of length N were
concerned. Thereby, hyperstrings enable transparallel processing, a
previously uncharacterized form of processing that might also be a form
of cognitive processing.
|
Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences USA, 101 (30),
10862--10867 (2004) |
Full text
Appendices |
|
Peter
A. van der Helm 