[Artificial Intelligence] MindSystems Theme Reader Not Terribly Useful on a Book

For an experiment with the Cirilab concept-recognition A.I. engine, my buddy Allan scanned and OCR-ed a copy of Dr. Linus Pauling’s book “How to Live Longer and Feel Better”. He sent it to me in PDF form (I have my own paper copy on my book shelf, of course, so I don’t think I am doing anything unethical concerning copyright). I ran the PDF through Mind Systems’ Theme Reader to automatically create a Mindjet Mind Manager mind map of the concepts of the book automatically.

The resulting mind map has three levels, and is so sparse as to not in any way represent the contents of the book. As a quick-and-dirty method for making a comprehensive mind map from the contents of a book, Theme Reader is not useful. Nuts. I had hoped to spare myself the many hours I spend ripping concepts and mind maps out of conceptually dense books.

Interestingly, and to its credit, the Cirilab A.I. engine did pull out the three main concepts of the book, that there are three interesting doses of vitamins:

• The minimum dose, below which you die.
• The maximum dose, above which you die.
• ·The optimum dose for best aggregate health and longest lifespan, which is somewhere between the minimum dose and the maximum dose, and almost never equal to the minimum dose.

I may have to rethink what I consider as “success”. The Cirilab tool did actually grab the major concepts out of the book.

I also have to fire off the Cirilab Speed Reader on the Pauling book. I think its results are identical to Theme Reader, but presented in a textual outline format rather than a graphical mind map format.

Now I want to think about feeding Alvin Toffler’s “Power Shift” and Dr. Thomas P. M. Barnett’s “The Pentagon’s New Map” and “Blueprint for Action” into the Cirilab tools, as I have read each of these books many times and I am intimately familiar with their contents and concepts.