Representations

I know nothing about representation theory, but in this context, a representation is a set of tuples. A relation is a set of two element tuples, and a function is a relation in which the first element of each tuple occurs in no other tuple. You can think of a relation as a function with range elements that are sets. Thus, the result of the function is the set of second tuple elements of tuples that have the function input in the first element. You can think of multivariable functions as sets of tuples with more than two elements. In prior posts, I represented space as a matrix of sides, where row(column) indicated boundary, and column(row) indicated region. In my Haskell code, the first representation I chose was a list of lists of region sets. The position in the outer list indicated boundary, and the position in the inner list indicated side. In subsequent representations, I indicated the boundary explicitly, instead of implicitly by list position. I also used representations where the innermost sets are sets of boundaries instead of regions. Whenever I came up with a new representation, I worried whether I could convert between one and another. Now that I understand representations are just sets of tuples, I no longer worry about converting; converting is as simple as changing the order of the elements in the tuples. In future computer architectures, I predict the preferred representation will be sets of tuples. In a computer, a set of tuples could be implemented as a CAM, a content addressable memory. The challenge would be to make the CAMs in the computer completely configurable. Right now, we are limited to RAMs, random access memories, because they are relatively easy to implement. Note that even RAMs are not completely configurable, some sequences of access are more efficient than others, depending on the particular implementation.