Editing Ontology:P156 (section)

== Usage notes ==

An Item's quilt score is a [[User:Reversedragon/Wavebuilder/2410-22 wave-score|method of scoring]] the complexity of concepts within Wavebuilder. It represents the total, literal number of unique elements required to make an element, excluding duplicates. The quilt score for a given element is the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardinality cardinality] (count) of the set of previous elements required, not counting the element being scored. The quilt score for combining two elements is the cardinality (count) of union of the quilt-sets for both elements.

Said another way, the quilt-sets for each element or Item must always be tracked along with each element as containing each previous element only once, before they are combined into a new set that contains each previous element only once plus the two elements that were combined and the new quilt-set is counted. The functionality for tracking quilt-sets is built into Wavebuilder's element data structure, making these calculations relatively painless. The ability to calculate such things through wiki text pages and macros is a bit more cumbersome, and almost out of the question in the case of recalculating a shorter route affecting a lot of elements. In general, if you want to calculate the scores for what appear to be shorter routes, it is better to use an off-wiki Wavebuilder program for the calculations and update them manually.

The tedious nature of calculating quilt scores is more or less what led to the [[Ontology:P158|wave sum]] metric being created. A wave sum loosely approximates a quilt score by simply adding two elements' cardinality numbers without trying to remove any duplicate elements in the chain, and thus does not require tracking any sets of unique elements. This metric may be more appropriate for such settings as wiki macro "spreadsheets" of numbers, although neither Lisp nor Javascript environments should have any issues with set-theory calculations and all three scores may be used in these environments.

In connection with quilt score, Litho<em>graph</em>ica Items have their own unique characteristic: there is a maximum quilt score, determined by the total number of Item pages and approximated by the highest Item number in use. Any time a new Item is added, the maximum possible quilt score increases. This can be taken two possible ways. Items with high quilt scores could represent interesting discoveries which are not easily encompassed by previous Items. Alternatively, Items with low quilt scores could be considered more interesting because the quilt score illustrates an easy way to reach them with a small number of concepts and shows that the ontology is efficient in its purpose of describing in a basic way what things are. This dichotomy of types of combinations is somewhat subjective. The Wavebuilder program was designed around discovering the most efficient ways to describe concepts, but the Infinite Craft program before it (a large language model) was designed more the opposite way around discovering relatively convoluted combinations and seeing what these "high-quilt-score" combinations would produce. In Litho<em>graph</em>ica terms, such Items are most likely to be things like entire philosophical corpora combining a thousand claims to arrive at a named philosophy, or a unique historical entity such as "Ireland" which wouldn't be easy to objectively describe if stereotypes are not allowed. Rarely, they will simply turn out to be one really big proposition in the vein of a current scientific hypothesis. Big quilt score Items are big ideas, either spatially or philosophically. Small quilt score Items are obvious ideas. One is important for discovery, the other is important for clarity of thought and explaining things quickly without getting lost. Each of them is important in their own way.


[[Category:Properties accepting an integer value]] [[Category:Wavebuilder]] [[Category:Wavebuilder mechanics ontology]]