The "-Space" Suffix

The "-space" suffix is something I'd like to call a Good Idea.

The best way I can explain it is with an example. Let's say I want to talk about walletspace. Walletspace isn't big compared to most spaces, but it's not trivially small, either. There are leather wallets, eelskin wallets, duct tape wallets (like mine), clear plastic wallets, wallets made for girls, "Bad Mother Fucker" wallets, etc. The idea of walletspace is that more similar wallets are closer to each other, and non-similar wallets are farther from each other. Now, we call it a "space", but it probably has more than three dimensions. But it's really hard to think of four-dimensional and higher spaces, so let's just imagine it in three. That should be good enough.

Walletspace, then, takes up a tiny portion of thingspace, near pursespace, boxspace, intersecting with leatherspace, etc. And thingspace takes up a tiny portion of conceptspace.

So my working definition of Xspace is, "the set of all X, arranged spatially by similarity". This intuitive definition might not be very helpful for rigorous academic papers, but for my blog I think it will more than suffice. You might point out that "arranged spacially" is redundant; is a space not, after all, spacial? No, it's not redundant, but it does appear circular or perhaps Strangely Loopy, but I think it's important to distinguish spacespace from "-space".

I have Eliezer Yudkowsky to thank for introducing me to this concept. I don't know who pulled this suffix out of suffixspace, but he introduced it to me with this article: http://lesswrong.com/lw/nl/the_cluster_structure_of_thingspace

Edit March 18, 2012: Just wrote this http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Configuration_space page, which is a shortened version of this paste.