Fundamentals The fundamental variables in Simulachron are distance, time and mass. All others can be derived from these.
Distance Fundamentally, Simulachron is a machine for building structures whose elements are close in space from experiences which are close in time. Experiences which occur close to each other in time are connected closely, and are "close" to each other, while less similar concepts are "far apart."
Polling the units All access to Simulacron, both input and output, is via the individual units. The distances among the concepts may be measured directlyby polling the units, or indirectly by examination of their artifacts.
Direct Polling All measurmement is comparison to some standard. In Simulachron, the distance or difference between any two conepts or ideas may be taken as a standard, and units asked to estimate the differences among other pairs as ratios to this standard.
Artifacts The Simulachron produces prodigious amounts of output. These outputs are themselves simulacra of the Simulachron. Two types of output are particularly useful: text and lists.
Text Texts are sequences of words or other symbols. They resemble Simulachron in that ideas that are close to each other in the text are close to each other in Simulachron. An effective way to measure the structure in Simulachron that produced the text is to process the text through an artificial neural network which is itself a simulation of the basic operation of Simulachron. The artificial neural network will produce a sumulacrum of those substructures of Simulachron that produced the text.
Lists Lists are collections of objects or ideas that "go together." Grocery lists, lists of symptoms, treatments, prognoses and outcomes, cars and their attributes -- all these are lists of concepts or ideas that the units of Simulachron believe "go together." Submitting lists of lists to artificial neural network analysis produces simulacra of those substructures of Simulachron that produced the lists.