I am always subtly amused when opening a book and one of the first pages encountered states that this page is intentionally left blank. Because, of course, it isn’t. There’s a statement printed on it. The situation reminds me of a first-time meditator deliberately trying to empty his or her mind of all thoughts - because, that’s how meditation is supposed to work, isn’t it. At least according to the first-time meditator’s belief. Yet, the more we try to empty our mind, the more we notice how distracted we actually are.
At a first glance, rhizomes may have a lot in common with existing technologies. Yet, when taking a closer look, there are important differences, and it is not possible to simply reduce a rhizome to one or another existing technology. In this post I will quickly compare rhizomes to a variety of different mathematical and computational concepts and data structures.
This post demonstrates how it is possible to use rhizomes to store simple HTML.
Consider the following HTML.
<html><head></head><body></body></html>
How could we store this in a rhizome? First of all, it would make sense to treat every HTML tag as an atomic symbol. There are three such symbols in the sample: html, head and body.
In this post I will look into how it is possible to search in rhizomes. I will assume that the rhizome implementation relies on pairing functions to store relations. I described the basic necessary data structures in a previous post. The term “searching in a rhizome” is not defined precisely. Searching implies that some contextual order is given and that the search is conducted in relation to this order. For rhizomes (similar to graphs) it is not entirely clear what constitutes this contextual order, the the definition of contextual order might depend upon one’s situation.
Erez Elul, whose honor it is to have “discovered” or “invented” the data structures I deliberately continue to call rhizomes, originally named his invention pile (or pile system). The relatively few authors (for instance Peter Krieg, Ralf Westphal, Ralf Barkow, Miriam Bedoni as well as others besides them), who both commented and contributed on the invention accepted this naming. I must say I never found the term particularly saying for several reasons.
