Information transformation

The purpose of information transformation is to change the information (data) representation while preserving the important essence of the information. There are several important concepts:

• to preserve the important essence of the information, as discussed in the last chapter
• to transform the representation of the information into a different data structure

Next, let us look at the transformation of visual information

• There is evidence that 2D pixellated information is transformed into vectorized information, using geometric components such as lines and shapes.
• Mistakes can be made in that transformation
• Some of the optical illusions examined in Psychology experiments are good examples.
• An example of such transformations can be seen with printers. A bitmap image can be printed. The bitmap may be separated into separate layers of colours, typically CMYK for printing presses, and RGB for monitors.
  • The same image can be printed by suitable printers using any and all of these data representations.
  • Optical character recognition (OCR) can be used to transform 2D pixellated information into a text representation.

Next, let us look at the transformation of action-related information

• Our starting point is to store and send millisecond by millisecond instructions to the muscles. That, of course, is totally unreasonable for long action sequences since we have to adapt the action to current circumstances.
• It is unlikely that two walks are precisely the same. For instance, to walk from the bed to the bathroom at night, even though very routine, will not be identical millisecond by millisecond, and muscle by muscle, even though it is dark and we do not need vision to find the way.
• We need to find a way of expressing the action at a higher level that captures the routine nature but does not require such precise repeatability - with the same number of steps at exactly the same time interval, etc. We may not even get out of bed onto the same foot every time, half asleep or not.
• One attractive analogy for this problem comes from computing, from computer software instructions
• At the simplest level, where we don't need to meet conditions from perception, we have the concept of macro expansion
• At the next level, we have the concept of programming instructions with conditions etc..