Transparallel processing by hyperstrings

Human vision research aims at understanding the brain processes that enable us to see the world as a structured whole consisting of separate objects. To explain how humans organize a visual pattern, structural information theory starts from the idea that our visual system prefers the organization with the simplest descriptive code, that is, the code that captures a maximum of visual regularity. Empirically, structural information theory gained support from psychological data on a wide variety of perceptual phenomena, but theoretically, the computation of guaranteed simplest codes remained a troubling problem. Here, the graph-theoretical concept of ‘‘hyperstrings’’ is presented as a key to the solution of this problem. A hyperstring is a distributed data structure that allows a search for regularity in O(2N) strings as if only one string of length N were concerned. Thereby, hyperstrings enable transparallel processing, a previously uncharacterized form of processing that might also be a form of cognitive processing.