Monday, October 20, 2014

The Memex

I found the increased focus on associated, rather than indexed information in the 1967 update to the description Memex was rather interesting. Like the proposed Memex, the main goal of modern search engines is to provide a semantic understanding of the internet, rather than a simple indexing of information. This means discovering how different pieces of content and authors are related to one another, and interpreting user interaction in a "do what I mean, not what I say" way. Although the concept is intuitive enough to be proposed over 50 years ago, the practical difficulties in implementing such an intelligent scheme means that today we still are not at the place Vannevar Bush wanted us to be. A relevant xkcd comic comes to mind when thinking about the gap between "this should be possible today" and the actual difficulties of implementation.

Looking around for a relevant related article, I stumbled on an individual's attempt to prototype the Memex in software. The implementation aimed to follow the original paper as closely as possible, implementing the interface as closely as he could given the limited description. He later went on to build another physical prototype of the device, using Bush's original idea of an augmented desk.

http://memexsim.sourceforge.net/
http://trevor.smith.name/memex/

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