- From: John F. Sowa <sowa@bestweb.net>
- Date: Sat, 26 May 2001 20:41:00 -0400
- To: cg@cs.uah.edu
- Cc: Seth Russell <seth@robustai.net>, "Emery, Pat" <pemery@grci.com>, www-rdf-logic@w3.org
The notion of order is much more general than that: > To put it in few words: An order is a special kind of relation. I think > that the fundamental property of an order is *antisymmetry*: you can say > that object x comes before (comes after, is above, is better than, is > more > beautiful than, etc.) object y only when you can't say that y comes > before (comes after, etc.) x (unless, in some cases, x and y are the > same > object). A general definition of order must also take into account the difference between crystals (which have various kinds of ordering) and glass (which is an amorphous solid -- more akin to a highly viscous liquid in structure). It must also account for any kind of process that increases or decreases entropy. In general, any system with higher entropy is more disordered, and any system with lower entropy is more ordered. John Sowa
Received on Saturday, 26 May 2001 20:41:03 UTC