Pen And Paper Reference Design
Experiment
You can experiment with the Entrelacs Paradigm using only a sheet of paper and a pencil.
- Pick a sample of information. Prefer intricate predicates like: “cows make milk”; “babies drink milk”; “cows drink water”; “drink is a verb”; “water boiling point is 100°C”, etc.
- Break the information into pieces to form a structure of pairs of atomic concepts. For example: (babies (drink milk)).
- Represent atomic concepts on the paper using signs (words, numbers, or doodles). Be careful to represent each concept only once.
- Draw arrows between paired signs, e.g., (drink → milk).
- Draw arrows between paired arrows, e.g., (babies → (drink → milk)).
- Repeat the previous steps until all arrows are drawn. Be careful not to mimic writing! Each arrow (e.g., drink → milk) must be drawn only once. A pencil drawing doesn’t mimic an Arrow Space if several arrows share the same ends.
Observe
Once finished, you may enjoy your work by noticing that:
- Any value (e.g., milk) is connected to all the information it belongs to.
- The same applies to a relation (e.g., drink → milk).
- You can add new information without erasing or modifying anything already drawn! Specifically, you can consider an existing piece of information at a more abstract level. For example: (at → (sea → level)) → ((water → (boiling → point)) → 100°C).
A Step Further
Replace signs with entrelacs, which are discrete closed structures of arrows like ‘Ouroboros,’ ‘Yin-Yang,’ ‘Triketra,’ etc. Now, your page contains only arrows, yet the drawing still represents information.
What Did We Do?
Did we invent a new data structure? Not really. Instead, we drew a data structure in a radically different way than we’re accustomed to, by following the Entrelacs Paradigm. We used pen and paper as a device to store arrows, prototyping an Arrow Space.
With some self-discipline, a human, a pen and a piece of paper can serve as a surprisingly effective Arrow Space. The Entrelacs Manifesto claims that the physical storage media of a computer may be turned into an Arrow Space as well by coding a whole new computing stack leveraging both disks and RAM.