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I was waiting for the inevitable Connections reference. It took longer than I expected. I like the idea and I like the article describing the background and ra
by NamTaf 1y ago
I was waiting for the inevitable Connections reference. It took longer than I expected.
I like the idea and I like the article describing the background and rationale. I look forward to poking around in it. However I have a little bit of a hang-up with calling it a “tree”. Namely, a tree conjures the image of it being a 1-to-N graph, i.e. a single idea leads to several new ones, and so on, when it is very much not.
Ironically Connections was really what rammed this point home for me. It really is more like a social media graph, where ideas from all over, old and new, coalesce into a new epiphany that leads to a new invention. Burke constantly demonstrated this in his examples, and explicitly rejected the linearity of inventions.
But then again, the concept of a ‘tree of tech’ is rather poetic :)
- garrettgarcia 1y agoI see your point about it not being a strict tree. It is tree-like, however, in the sense that the branches/edges only point in one direction: forward in time.
- MarkusQ 1y agoBut it's a reticulating structure; yes, the graph is directed / partially ordered, but it's certainly not tree-like. The key property of real trees is that they _branch_ and the branches don't recombine.
- garrettgarcia 1y agoAu contraire: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inosculation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inosculation I do agree that branches staying separate is the essential property of a tree data structure.
- Retric 1y agoThat’s referring to a joining between different trees not the same tree. The need to connect leaves to roots is what gives individuals trees their branching nature. Obviously a tree can have holes in it etc, but loops in nutrient delivery present an inherent issue.
- aidenn0 1y agoWhich is why the article points out that it's a directed acyclic graph, not a tree.
- jlcx 1y agoSpeaking of Burke, I believe his book The Pinball Effect has notations in the margins directing the reader to other pages that mention the same node in the graph (whether that's exactly how he thought of it or not). It seems like an interesting attempt to express this non-linear structure in the form of a book.
- Sniffnoy 1y agoHe explicitly says in the article that it's actually a DAG.