Open Problems in Structured Information Models

This is mainly a placeholder for a long list of open questions that came to mind while working on our recent semantic axelrod model paper. I’ll organize it later.

Nonequilibrium and Diachronic Analysis

I’ve already outlined some next steps for non-equilibrium, diachronic analyses. This would allow direct examination of evolving learning rates, instead of comparing static snapshots with different rate values, and the effect of changing the design space dimensionality and size during evolution.

Ultrametric distances

Distances on a tree follow a metric called the “ultrametric” distance. The discrete metric (e.g., on nominal categories) is also an ultrametric. It has properties different than Euclidean distances, and a host of theorems that prove useful in phylogenetic reconstruction methods, etc.

I should learn more about ultrametricity and its applications, while taking a look at the semantic axelrod model again.