Extrapolating technology and with a bit of crafty encoding I am sure it would be possible to load all building plans ever put onto paper into a monolithic database.

Thinking about this, as a rectangular box pushing on the infinite sphere of possibilities, the data would visualise as a Russian doll of overlapping designs with large sections of vigorous amounts of designs, with some sparse out there pushes to the precising envelope.

Obviously most people would turn up to the database, state the build requirements, and that section of designs, plus the odd data outliers would be listed.

This database of course would be the gold standard for architects as any design could be analyzed and quickly labelled derivative. Only the rare, unique designs , the standard deviation standouts, would get a new database entry,

Life, of course, won't be the design, it will be the GPT3 material designer.
-- wjt, Dec 07 2021

In what sense "quantum"?
-- pertinax, Dec 07 2021


How would you handle orientation questions?
-- pocmloc, Dec 07 2021


An abstraction envelope of all design paths.
-- wjt, Dec 07 2021


[pocmloc] front door ? (nice,[+] for the question)
-- wjt, Dec 07 2021


Not as reliable as you might think. In Australia, if one side of the house faces towards a pubic access road and the opposite side faces towards the beach, the "front" is the side towards the beach. It took me a while to get used to that way of thinking.
-- pertinax, Dec 07 2021


This is more about relating designs of the structure against others. The environment can always change.
-- wjt, Dec 07 2021


//An abstraction envelope//

"Oh, dear ... "
"Earthquake? Sink hole? Subsidence?"
"No, the wave function collapsed. "
-- pertinax, Dec 07 2021


Yes think of traditional English churches, some have only a south door, some have only a west door, some have both. Some are not oriented exactly east-west. Some are at completely different orientation (e.g. if built in a city). Yet the architectural plan is often very similar apart from these considerations.
-- pocmloc, Dec 07 2021


Tell me more about these pubic access roads. Are the toll workers attractive?
-- RayfordSteele, Dec 07 2021


I think in the case of churches, and indeed with many buildings, you could break the database down further into sub-units of buildings in order to get around the orientation / access design issues, ie. 'lobby,' 'service exit,' 'shipping /receiving' etc.

How much of the database is going to be Starbucks and/or McDonalds?
-- RayfordSteele, Dec 07 2021


It can take a toll, after a while.
-- pertinax, Dec 07 2021


Surely the most common building type worldwide is the dwelling-house?

I was thinking of combination buildings, such as a terrace of houses; this seems to me to be one single building which contains a number of independent dwellings each with its own front door and with no interconnection between, but the building is a single building? Then what about a block within a city, is that a single building or a number of buildings attached to each other? What about an underground bunker? And so therefore is the tube a single building?
-- pocmloc, Dec 07 2021


I'm confident that something like this is already under "todo" items for OpenAI and DeepMind. Is perhaps "quantum data blob for X" -- a new idea? I think procedural generator for 3D in-game assets (like trees, bricks, cars, etc.), and something called "Factory" in OOP (more abstract object for creating other objects - parametrized instances), is often based on feature extraction (like GPT-3) applied on similar databases.

What you call a "Quantum Data Blob", I'd call a non-parametric "Statistical Model". People were doing these for as long as I remember. Is doing them - new? No. Would doing one about architecture - be new? Perhaps. Would it be useful? Yeah, there's even a business model for that (like with wombo.art website).

I like you calling this a database for what it would be. I don't like that the idea is too concrete, that is, the fact that it would be quite easy to come up with many such "Quantum data blob" (for this and for that) ideas. So, I'm undecided about [+/-]. :)
-- Inyuki, Dec 07 2021



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