News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:The Human Brain Can Create Structures in Up to 11 Dimensions by karmakaze on Saturday August 31, 2019 @06:37PM (#20849239)
It's hard to tell from the post what the terms are being used to describe. First of all, I would consider a dimension either space-time or mathematical to be an orthogonal/independent concern. Now where this gets distractingly blurry is that the paper itself says "The number of neurons in a clique determines its size, or more formally, its dimension." which uses dimension to mean size, like a length.

If I'm generous I could maybe believe that larger cliques form more complex connection patterns and can perform higher dimensional processing. But even this fails as the paper then goes on to describe the cliques and cavities as being higher-dimensional.

All that aside, I do think there's something to the paper, just using some poor choice of terms. It seems what's being described as complex is both the physical non-uniform pattern of connection and the subgraphs of activation which may be able to consider a high number of dimensions for a given input stimulus. I couldn't follow the Simplices/Complexes/Betti numbers to see how it relates to a measure of dimension.

Re:The Human Brain Can Create Structures in Up to 11 Dimensions by Mirioron on Saturday August 31, 2019 @08:23PM (#20849700)
Why would the space-time and mathematical concept of dimensions be orthogonal? Don't we use the mathematical concept of dimension when dealing with space-time dimensions? Software developers in particular should have intuitive understanding of this connection, because implementing space-time in code is usually done through methods that closely resemble mathematical dimensions. Eg if you were to implement a point in 3 dimensional space time you'd give the point xyz and t as variables.
Re:The Human Brain Can Create Structures in Up to 11 Dimensions by karmakaze on Saturday August 31, 2019 @09:02PM (#20849856)
I don't mean the math one orthogonal to the space-time one. I mean that dimensions are orthogonal to each other whether in math or space-time (except special relativities).