This paper is largely why I basically threatened to resign from HP's $500M
Internet Chapter 2 project if they made me hire H-1b rather than Tom to
solve some fundamental issues I'd been grappling with ever since
AT&T/Knight-Ridder put me in charge of architecting their alternative to
the Internet back in 1981.  I think they let me hire him only because they
were aware that, despite my being friendly with the H-1b coworkers, I would
probably have sued HP.  But then the DotCon bubble popped and all remaining
money had to be spent on cramming 5-10 H-1bs per Cupertino apartment -- no
money for people like Tom:

https://www.slac.stanford.edu/pubs/slacpubs/7750/slac-pub-7890.pdf

PROCESS, SYSTEM, CAUSALITY, AND QUANTUM
MECHANICS
A Psychoanalysis of Animal Faith
Tom Etter
112 Blackburn Avenue
Menlo Park, California 94025{2704
and
H. Pierre Noyes
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94309


On Sun, Dec 21, 2025 at 9:09 AM James Bowery <[email protected]> wrote:

>
>
> On Wed, Oct 15, 2025 at 11:40 AM Matt Mahoney <[email protected]>
> wrote:
> ...
>
> 4. Tiny dictionary encoding using byte pair encoding, replacing the least
>> frequent byres with codes for the most frequent byte pairs until there is
>> no more size reduction, which takes about 6 passes when the pairing is
>> restricted to groups of letters or groups of repeated punctuation symbols
>> that are used in the XML, HTML, and Wikipedia markup....
>> I have some ideas for tokenization and for modeling a semantic network
>> with an attention mechanism like in a transformer, but that doesn't require
>> a GPU to run reasonably fast. But it will be awhile before I have any code
>> ready to release.
>>
> ...
>
> Yesterday, a dynamical MDL approach to the Re-Pair algorithm emerged from
> formalizing Tom Etter's Relation Arithmetic approach to foundations I've
> been working on in Lean4, so that I get the philosophy of causality right
> from the gitgo.
>
> A couple of years ago I played around with Re-Pair as an approach to
> lossless compression but couldn't figure out a principled approach to
> causality using it.  Since my goal in life at this point is to demonstrate
> discovery of macrosocial dynamics latent in the data by approximating the
> Algorithmic Information Criterion for model selection and get a prize
> funded to nuke the social pseudosciences before they succeed in nuking
> humanity with their "Alignment" theocracy, I had to continue working on the
> philosophy of causality itself which is why I revisited Etter's largely
> unpublished corpus.
>
> I didn't even realize it was incorporating a variation of BPE until I
> began more carefully examining the structure of the causal graphs.
>
> Too bad the Desi's thought their H-1b attack on the West was more
> important than supporting people like Tom
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmouth_workshop>.
>
> Around June 18, 1956, the earliest participants (perhaps only Ray
>> Solomonoff, maybe with Tom Etter) arrived at the Dartmouth campus in
>> Hanover, N.H., to join John McCarthy who already had an apartment there.
>> Solomonoff and Minsky stayed at Professors' apartments, but most would stay
>> at the Hanover Inn.
>
>
>
>
>

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