N-Gram

[James Hicks <71332.747@CompuServe.COM>]

Business Week, Nov. 29, 1993, p. 99

"BUT WILL IT REMEMBER WHERE THE CAR KEYS ARE?"

    Joseph M. Bugajsky quit Ford Motor Co. in 1985 to pursue his dream of 
inventing a computer formula that would analyze and store data the same way 
the human brain does.  This September, his efforts paid off with a U.S. patent
on a system that spots patterns in data and compresses the data into 
"memories."  These memories, Bugajsky says, take up only one-half of 1% of the
original space.  That could make them a boon to banks, libraries, and 
laboratories flooded with data.
    The key to Bugajsky's software for supercomputers, called N-Gram, is that 
it not only finds patterns in data but also patterns within the patterns, as 
human memory does.  The layers of patterns are linked, so "recalling" 
something consists of working back down from the abstract to the specific.  
The original can be reconstructed down to the last bit.  Bugajsky's company, 
Triada Ltd., in Ann Arbor, Mich., is planning tests with, among others, NASA 
and the National Institutes of Health.
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Any comments?
 >James<