ACEnetica

Discussion about the use of self-organisation for automatically "programming" networks of processing nodes.

Monday, January 23, 2006

Information processing researchers don't like quantum field theory?

Having discovered that the problem uploading images was my fault (see update comment here) I am now trying to remember what I was planning to post about my Discrete network dynamics. Part 1: Operator theory paper. I am finding it difficult to pick up this thread.

Thus far the paper has attracted only one comment, which I hope that I answered satisfactorily. I am disappointed not to have received more comments, and it makes it difficult for me to guess what best to focus on in my planned follow-up postings on the paper. It also makes it difficult for me to fine tune the paper so that it is ready for peer-reviewed publication; I still have not submitted it for publication.

It is possible that despite my efforts to make the quantum field theory aspect of the paper self-contained, it nevertheless proves to be unintelligible to my intended readers (i.e. people working on information processing networks). Well, that is not surprising to me, because QFT is not really what you would expect to use when doing information processing.

I guess my intended readers will pay attention only when I develop the theoretical methods further, and in particular when I derive practical information processing algorithms. I can promise these readers that they are in for some surprises.

I have wondered whether a better target audience would be quantum field theorists, who might be interested to read about an unusual application of (some of) the QFT methods that they are already familiar with. I guess that there are lots of researchers who are highly trained in QFT, who eventually end up doing research in an area where QFT is not used, but who would prefer to be doing research that is based on QFT.

Anyway, I now plan to write a few postings to explain some of the background research on information processing that leads to the QFT techniques that I describe in my paper (see here). This might alleviate some of the "QFT?! Is Luttrell mad?!" responses that I suspect might be lurking out there.

Update: I have now submitted my paper (see here) to the Journal of Machine Learning Research, which "provides an international forum for the electronic and paper publication of high-quality scholarly articles in all areas of machine learning. All published papers are freely available online." (quoted from their web site).