The origins of Cuil Theory
2009/02/20/0630Haha! This comment on reddit is totally awesome. It was epic enough to spawn a wiki dedicated to exploring Cuil Theory in greater depth. The short of things is this: Cuil is a search engine that does not search things; instead, it is a simulation of search upon an abstraction of things.
When Cuil indexes a site, it actually indexes the things that the site is related to, instead of indexing the site. When you search the Cuil index, it does not search for your term, but instead searches for terms that are derived from your term; those terms are compared to the derived representations of the sites in the Cuil index.
The net result is an amazingly bizarre, disjointed and tenuous grasp on reality, like a severely advanced case of semantic dementia. Cuil theory attempts to generalize this system of understanding to apply in other situations than web search. The seminal work on Cuil Theory has been copied, below.
RTFA: http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/7da5i/p…
Can we make that a unit of measurement?
One Cuil = One level of abstraction away from the reality of a situation.
Example: You ask me for a Hamburger.
1 Cuil: if you asked me for a hamburger, and I gave you a raccoon.
2 Cuils: If you asked me for a hamburger, but it turns out I don’t really exist. Where I was originally standing, a picture of a hamburger rests on the ground.
3 Cuils: You awake as a hamburger. You start screaming only to have special sauce fly from your lips. The world is in sepia.
4 Cuils: Why are we speaking German? A mime cries softly as he cradles a young cow. Your grandfather stares at you as the cow falls apart into patties. You look down only to see me with pickles for eyes, I am singing the song that gives birth to the universe.
And so on.
edit: other Cuil levels added for completeness.
5 Cuils: You ask for a hamburger, I give you a hamburger. You raise it to your lips and take a bite. Your eye twitches involuntarily. Across the street a father of three falls down the stairs. You swallow and look down at the hamburger in your hands. I give you a hamburger. You swallow and look down at the hamburger in your hands. You cannot swallow. There are children at the top of the stairs. A pickle shifts uneasily under the bun. I give you a hamburger. You look at my face, and I am pleading with you. The children are crying now. You raise the hamburger to your lips, tears stream down your face as you take a bite. I give you a hamburger. You are on your knees. You plead with me to go across the street. I hear only children’s laughter. I give you a hamburger. You are screaming as you fall down the stairs. I am your child. You cannot see anything. You take a bite of the hamburger. The concrete rushes up to meet you. You awake with a start in your own bed. Your eye twitches involuntarily. I give you a hamburger. As you kill me, I do not make a sound. I give you a hamburger.
6 Cuils: You ask me for a hamburger. My attempt to reciprocate is cut brutally short as my body experiences a sudden lack of electrons. Across a variety of hidden dimensions you are dismayed. John Lennon hands me an apple, but it slips through my fingers. I am reborn as an ocelot. You disapprove. A crack echoes through the universe in defiance of conventional physics as cosmological background noise shifts from randomness to a perfect A Flat. Children everywhere stop what they are doing and hum along in perfect pitch with the background radiation. Birds fall from the sky as the sun engulfs the earth. You hesitate momentarily before allowing yourself to assume the locus of all knowledge. Entropy crumbles as you peruse the information contained within the universe. A small library in Phoenix ceases to exist. You stumble under the weight of everythingness, Your mouth opens up to cry out, and collapses around your body before blinking you out of the spatial plane. You exist only within the fourth dimension. The fountainhead of all knowledge rolls along the ground and collides with a small dog. My head tastes sideways as spacetime is reestablished, you blink back into the corporeal world disoriented, only for me to hand you a hamburger as my body collapses under the strain of reconstitution. The universe has reasserted itself. A particular small dog is fed steak for the rest of its natural life. You die in a freak accident moments later, and you soul works at the returns desk for the Phoenix library. You disapprove. Your disapproval sends ripples through the inter-dimensional void between life and death. A small child begins to cry as he walks toward the stairway where his father stands.
