Title: Abstraction Content: An Abstraction keeps only the most important information about something in order to make it easier to reuse. Abstraction concerns the ways by which higher, less real concepts are derived from the usage and classification of literal ("real" or "concrete") data or other information. Abstractions may be formed by reducing the information content of a concept or a phenomenon as viewed, often to keep only the information which is needed for a particular purpose. For example, abstracting a leather soccer ball to the more general idea of a ball will keep only the information on general ball attributes and behavior, leaving out the traits of that particular ball. Compare with word: generalizing. The opposite of the adjective "abstract" is commonly the word "concrete". ==Origins== The first symbols of abstract thinking in humans can be traced to fossil objects dating between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago in Africa.Ancient Engravings Push Back Origin of Abstract Thought ==Thought process== In philosophical terminology, abstraction is the thought process wherein ideasBut an idea can be symbolized. "A symbol is any device whereby we are enabled to make an abstraction." -- p.xi and chapter 20 of Suzanne K. Langer (1953), Feeling and Form: a theory of art developed from Philosophy in a New Key: New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 431 pages, index. are distanced from objects. Abstraction uses a strategy of simplification, where formerly concrete details are left ambiguous, vague, or undefined; thus effective communication about things in the abstract requires an intuitive or common experience between the communicator and the communication recipient. right|thumb|125px|Cat on Mat (picture 1) For example, many different things can be the color red. Likewise, many things sit on surfaces (as in picture 1, to the right). The property of redness and the relation sitting-on are therefore abstractions of those objects. Specifically, the conceptual diagram graph 1 identifies only three boxes, two ellipses, and four arrows (and their six labels), whereas the picture 1 shows much more pictorial detail, with the scores of implied relationships as implicit in the picture rather than with the nine explicit details in the graph. Graph 1 details some explicit relationships between the objects of the diagram. For example, the arrow between the agent and CAT:Elsie depicts an example of an is-a relationship, as does the arrow between the location and the MAT. The arrows between the gerund SITTING and the nouns agent and location express the diagram's basic relationship; "agent is SITTING on location"; Elsie is an instance of CAT. Although the description sitting-on (graph 1) is more abstract than the graphic image of a cat sitting on a mat (picture 1), the delineation of abstract things from concrete things is somewhat ambiguous; this ambiguity or vagueness is characteristic of abstraction. Thus something as simple as a newspaper might be specified to six levels, as in Douglas Hofstadter's illustration of that ambiguity, with a progression from abstract to concrete in Gödel, Escher, Bach (1979): > :(1) a publication ::(2) a newspaper :::(3) The San Francisco Chronicle > ::::(4) the May 18 edition of the Chronicle :::::(5) my copy of the May 18 > edition of the Chronicle ::::::(6) my copy of the May 18 edition of the > Chronicle as it was when I first picked it up (as contrasted with my copy as > it was a few days later: in my fireplace, burning) An abstraction can thus encapsulate each of these levels of detail with no loss of generality. But perhaps a detective or philosopher/scientist/engineer might seek to learn about some thing, at progressively deeper levels of detail, to solve a crime or a puzzle.