Implication, Entailment, and Honours Projects

I don't know how anyone at all read the last post given the volume and quality of the typos, I've gone through now and fixed most of them so I can at least pretend there's some flow there. I'm going to leave creativity aside a little this week but it may come up as an afterthought or perhaps a consequence of some of the stuff I write about today. The blog post in store for you is more of a pros and cons list for me, I'm planning an honours project and as is usually the trouble with me I'll be damned if I can come up with one particular idea instead of either a million ideas, or a million grandiose ideas. My supervisor accused me of trying to fit a PhD into a four month project, and on further analysis that's certainly not impossible. Frontrunners include my ubiquitous presumed by many theoretical PCG story writer, a thing that sits somewhere between an implication and an entailment engine, and a 'style' analyser. I've already written about my PCG friend, and the style analyser would use word counting and a few other tricks to attempt to tie into the creativity fix I've been on and so, right now I think I'll write a few paragraphs on the middle project. Since I need to submit something of a plan for this system by Friday for a meeting next Thursday this seems like a good time to muse about entailment.

When I first came up with the project I was trying and failing to come up with an easily encapsulated four-month project that tied into my little error obsession, most of my thinking on the topic has been high level philosophy and not as much into the nitty gritty of implementation^[1] and so I narrowed in on how people fill in information that they don't know in basic situations something of a common sense corpus expressed in conditionals and biconditionals rather than two distinct yet similar (old) projects designed by two Canadians^[2] sort of to the tune of:

If the sky is black then it is night time

This statement obviously isn't always true, maybe it's raining, maybe there's an eclipse, perhaps our untimely death is coming swift on the wings of enough arrows to blot out the sun, however we can probably rank fairly easily how sure we (as people) are of the likelihood of a statement. My professor and I thought it may be sort of neat to build a graph for this 'implication' engine, and I was personally interested in how 'likely' it is that this is the result, maybe via some sort of web crawler (second part being around the time the wax on my wings starts melting).

I find this topic especially interesting because it's how we work. We can have things like optical illusions, and focus on particular things, we can imagine and we can visualize all because our brain actively fills in details that we don't notice. There's this cool implicity^[3] in how we interact with the world. Humanity is so great at picking out patterns that we can even see them^[4] where none is there, seeing a human face in tree bark combines our seeing patterns with our expectation that there is meaning there, in my project I'm hoping to sort of tease out the ways that 'seeing' one thing can lead to us building an entire picture about the way things are.

Anyways, there's my tight, concise and of course easily attainable project laid out for everyone. HAHAHA.