The computer and the analysis of myths.

The article focuses on the computer and the analysis of myths. The human mind can explore its own workings as revealed in two of its more powerful manifestations, namely, the myth and the computer, in each of which it is possible to detect echoes of the other. According to E.B. Tylor, sociologist, among those opinions which are produced by a little knowledge, to be dispelled by a little more, is the belief in an almost boundless creative power of the human imagination. The treatment of similar myths from different regions, by arranging them in large compared groups, makes it possible to trace in mythology the operation of imaginative processes recurring with the evident regularity of mental law, and thus stories of which a single instance would have been a mere isolated curiosity, take their place among well-marked and consistent structures of the human mind. Tylor wrote these lines a hundred years ago. No instrument lends itself better, in principle at any rate, to this sort of rigorous intellectual self-contemplation than the computer. The general purpose of the paper is to study the contribution of data-processing in the study of mythology. The construction of algorithms in mythological studies is a complicated business, but computers can do it with ease. The computer is eminently capable of exploring operative ambiguity.