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Compression

2023.04.16

Interface as Compression

Computers love numbers. Actually, they hate everything except numbers. But humans are good with electrical signals (smell, taste and touch), electromagnetic waves (sight), and mechanical waves (sound). So in order for computers to communicate with humans, there needs to be an interpreter that interfaces between these two representations.

It is not a coincidence that majority of resources have gone into inventing better technology involves:

1. build better computers
2. build better interfaces

People use human language to communicate, but computers give us this piece of plastic board with a bunch of buttons for you to press. It seems like you have to compress your intentions into a finite input space to transmit signals. So that means "building better interfaces" can be defined as reducing the compression work from humans and moving it toward computers.

Intelligence as Compression

The squishy thinking organism we carried around is the accumulation of human evolution packaging knowledge and experience for thousands of years. After you are born, you do not learn to talk after 2 or 3 years. You had already been learning to talk for thousands of years. It is the beauty of how intelligence can be compressed, transferred and mutated. This begs the question, "how did it do it?"

One observation is the brain itself has a special compression representation, much like vector embeddings. After all, machine is trying to mimic the learning process, coincedently, very similar to how brain works - compressing lots of data into embedding vector space.