Meme bank

memes a problem-solving approach

A meme is an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture. A meme bank would be a zoo for cataloging and breeding memes.
meme
TRIZ
tetrad
brainstorm
algorithm
Author

Oren Bochman

Published

Thursday, December 30, 2021

TLDR

Introduced in (Dawkins 1976), a meme is an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture. A meme bank would be a zoo for cataloging and breeding memes.

Dawkins, R. 1976. The Selfish Gene. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK.

Meme bank

Disrupting innovation - using brainstorming, TRIZ, Mcluhan’s tetrad (McLuhan 1988), and so on.

McLuhan, Marshall. 1988. Understanding Media : The Extensions of Man. New York: New American Library. http://www.worldcat.org/search?qt=worldcat_org_all&q=0451624963.

Creating a bank of memes seems almost like an idea out of science fiction. Sure there are ontologies and so on, but memes are supposed to be alive, so this is as much a project about algorithms as it is about creating artificial life.

Could a meme bank be used in a procedures like TRIZ to come up with new solutions to open problems or to improve existing ones. Could they be used with Marshal Mcluhan’s tetrad to try and predict change and even disruptions of new media and technology?

Use cases

  1. attacking a problem
  2. approaching creativity using generate-and-test
  3. choosing an approach
  4. identifying similarity and difference between algorithms etc.
  5. genetic programming
  6. generalizing in mathematics

What constitutes a meme?

For the meme bank one might want to collect memes from the wild but also to perhaps establish a meritocracy and allocate resources to memes that seem to be more useful. In science ideas are often formalized as theories. This statement and behavior of theories have been studied and later formalized using the interrelated mathematical branches of formal languages, logic, set theory and category theory. In other domain like fashion or popular culture we may lack such rigor.

The more formaly stated a meme is the fewer minds it can inhabit. But perhpas could

Are memes alive ?

Memes have a number of properties:

  • Birth:
    • Memes, must orginate with someone
  • Spreading:
    • The then gain traction over time.
  • Decline:
    • Many ideas can also lose traction and become discredited or supplanted by more powerful ideas.
  • Can they evolve?
    • If memes are alive can they breed !?
    • How should memes be represented ?

Meme’s don’t have DNA, but they often have a complex genealogy. This suggests that emergent memes contain some aspects of simpler memes that may have vanished from our minds. Why should we care about such basic ideas? It would seem that having a more basic idea is going to be easier to work with. At least in the sense that a simple meme might be easier to utilize or generalize or combine than a complex one.

Specialized type of memes.

  • Words (have etymologies)
  • Scientific theories
  • Data structure
  • Frames.
  • Scripts.
  • Classes.
  • Algorithm.
  • Design Patterns.
  • Religion.
  • Media
  • Art Clearly we would treat words algorithms differently.

Algorithmic memes:

Problems

If you want to collect memes you should look at problems, as memes we often present as parts of the solutions.

A bank

Mathematical:

  • morphism
  • equivilence
  • mapping
    • identity
    • order
    • reflexive
    • transitive
  • relation
  • axioms
  • continuity
  • compactness
  • maximum and minimum
  • distance
  • game.
  • topology.
  • matrix.
  • group.
  • probability distribution
  • grammar
  • fsm
  • markov chain
  • gausian process

Logic

  • deduction
  • causality
  • correlation
  • sylogism
  • normal form
  • skolemization
  • completeness

cognitive

  • generate-and-test
  • sample
    • stratified
    • snowball
  • optimization
  • filtering
  • smoothing
  • search
    • Depth first search
    • Breadth first search
    • Beam search
    • MCMC search ?
    • Adverserial search ?
    • ab search
  • Space filling curves
    • Hilbert,Peano, Lebesgue, Moore, Sierpinski.
  • Space filling trees
  • Similarity and distances

data structures:

  • sets
  • categories
  • graphs
    • trees
  • lists
  • linked lists
  • array
    • tables
  • dictionary
  • state space
  • topology

In my bank:

  • decomposing PCA into its consituents

  • vitrtebi alg - converting it to boolean view of transitions + a likelyhood for one happening

  • is an analysis sing using there is a solution to one with none

  • variational autoencoder + gan =

  • sampling + a space filling curve

  • error propagation though sampling ?

  • propergating error gradients through a sampling step ?

  • are there other repramtrization trick we can

  • spacewise-seperable convolutional layers - can we represent larger

  • convolutinos as products of 2 or 3 matrices

  • negative sampling

  • inverse sampling

  • follow the leader

  • follow the regularized leader

  • regret

  • recursive matrix alg

  • non-negative matrix factorization

  • widen dataframe from wikidata

References

  • Steven S. Skiena - The Algorithm Design Manual 2nd Edition
  • Thomas Kuhn - The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
  • Christopher Alexander - The Timeless Way of Building
  • John E. Hopcroft and Jeffrey D. Ullman - Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation, Addison-Wesley Publishing, Reading Massachusetts, 1979. ISBN 81-7808-347-7.

Citation

BibTeX citation:
@online{bochman2021,
  author = {Bochman, Oren},
  title = {Meme Bank},
  date = {2021-12-30},
  url = {https://orenbochman.github.io/posts/2020/2020-12-30-meme-bank/2020-12-30-meme-bank.html},
  langid = {en}
}
For attribution, please cite this work as:
Bochman, Oren. 2021. “Meme Bank.” December 30, 2021. https://orenbochman.github.io/posts/2020/2020-12-30-meme-bank/2020-12-30-meme-bank.html.