The very best concepts apply in multiple domains. Often, they have different names in those domains, even though they’re about the same underlying idea. Here’s an example:
Part of the fun of learning Go is like pretending that you’re speaking Japanese. There are these concepts like Sente or Gote or Seki or Atari or Thickness. I slowly dawned on me that these are just synonyms for concepts that I was using in my science. Aji is just cryptic variation. Gote is just neutral variation […] Maybe the true grand unified theory, and I think our project is much more grand unified theory than physics, because we’re not just doing physics, we’re doing all these fields, is realizing that all these kinds of combinatorial solution spaces that have to be searched to discover functions, share common properties. My interest in those games has been as a window into the grand unified theory of complexity.
That’s evolutionary biologist David Krakauer, talking with Jim Rutt. The hope that some fundamental concepts translate between different domains is what drove me to start the Encyclopedia of Concepts on this site. Here are the ones I’ve started to think about them.
Nehaveigur 