[time 530] Surreal numbers


Stephen P. King (stephenk1@home.com)
Thu, 12 Aug 1999 11:56:24 -0400


Hi All,

        Perhaps this might spark a discussion!

http://www.innerx.net/personal/tsmith/surreal.html

"Surreal Numbers are just sequences of binary choices, and
constructing them is something of a game. It begins with the
simplest surreal number, an empty sequence made up of nothing
at all: this is written as 0, and is the starting place of what
mathematician Martin Kruskal calls the Binary Number Tree."

        It is this notion of "contruction by games" that I am proposing is
occuring when I say "LSs interact with each other by bisimulating each
other". Here we think of a bisimulational action as a mutual labeling of
properties. This, I tenatively propose is that happens in an
observation...
        I am thinking of how it is that we can think about labeling "points" in
our spaces with numbers; how is it that the orderings are manifested?
Are orderings ontologically a priori, or are they ex post facto defined
by the interactions of the subsets of the Universe, or something else? I
do not think that "objects" exist a priori with labels attached. It
seems that the act of labeling is implicit in any observation and that
the particular order of labels is "subjective"...

Onward,

Stephen



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