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From: wex@dali.pws.bull.com (Buckaroo Banzai)
Newsgroups: sci.virtual-worlds
Subject: Re: "Space" -- electron energies
Message-ID: <WEX.90Aug10135005@dali.pws.bull.com>
Date: 10 Aug 90 17:50:05 GMT
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In article <9008082218.AA27737@milton.u.washington.edu>
phys2094@waikato.ac.nz demonstrates that he knows a *hell* of a lot more
about physics than I do.  Good enough.  I was just trying to give an example
of a space that would be naturally represented as non-continuous.

Of course, now that it's days later I can think of other examples.  Perhaps
the best example is the Boolean space.  Values of this type are either true
or false.  Some multi-valued logics may allow another value (e.g. unknown),
but if we are going to represent truly Boolean properties our dimension will
have two values and no more.*

[*OK, maybe three.  There is an argument for including a value in every
dimension to represent the state this-property-not-present-on-this-object.
Call this value <Alpha>.

For example, you may have properties that simply don't make sense for an
object or that are not or can not be measured on a given object.

Now in theory you don't need this value, you can describe objects by the
property tuple:
	<P0, P1, ... , Pm> where m<=N, N being the number of properties in
	the union of all Pm in your cyberspace.

Adding Alpha gives you:
	<P0, P1, ... , PN> with the not-m properties filled in by Alphas.

The reason for doing this is that it allows more generality in constructing
the actual displays.  In particular, it allows you to construct displays
where one dimension represents a measured property and another dimension
does not.  It is *very* hard to show a screen where an object has a position
on the Y axis and *no* position on the X axis :-)
]

--
--Alan Wexelblat			phone: (508)294-7485
Bull Worldwide Information Systems	internet: wex@pws.bull.com
"Politics is Comedy plus Pretense."