3/23/2026 at 9:10:31 AM
> Let's follow one example: Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa. In Abstract Wikipedia, this might be stored as: Z27243(Q1033, Q138758272, Q6256, Q15, Z27243K5)Haha that's like John Wilkins' "Real Character, and a Philosophical Language"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Ricerca_della_Lingua_Perfet... is a great intro to the weird and wonderful world of abstract/universal/ideal/a priori languages.
by internet_points
3/23/2026 at 11:59:06 AM
It's not that different from how LLM tokens work, only in a tree structure as opposed to a plain sequence. Having a tree structure makes it easier to formally define rewrite rules (which is key for interpretability), as opposed to learning them from data as LLM do.by zozbot234
3/24/2026 at 9:38:35 AM
Also tokens don't represent meaning in themselves, but are assigned points in a multidimensional space, they can only represent meaning in the network as a whole when combined with other tokens in context and order.And the abstract concepts of Abstract Wikipedia are human-defined, top-down ways of carving the world into distinct categories which make some kind of logical sense, whereas LLM's work bottom-up and create overlapping, non-hierarchical, probabilistic networks of connections with nearly no imposed structure except the principle that you shall know a token by the company it keeps.
But you can type them both out with keys on a keyboard so in that sense I guess they're not that different.
by internet_points