America's Cup and Formula One races are won at the design stages. We praise the drivers, but what succeeds is the engineering.

If billions of dollars of IPO value were at stake, competing to use animation to convey an understanding to test subjects, this design would be toast. The model is cripplingly realistic, wasting most of its cognitive bandwidth on provoking a "Gee willikers, it really looks like someone built that out of wood!" reaction, leaving us to squint to see the balls or the parts of the machine implementing the logic. There's a particular genius to logo design, that needs to be applied here. If this were instead a cartoon animation, Walt Disney dosed the coffee one day at the studio to see what his animators could do, we'd get a visualization that better used its cognitive bandwidth to establish an icon language with the viewer.

The abacus is the T-shirt for this idea. Like a musical instrument, one can imagine operating an abacus without holding one, and some shopkeepers were able to leave theirs in a drawer after enough practice. Beads, like balls, leverage our brains' ability to manipulate physical reality, but the idea of counting became more vivid as the abacus design grew more streamlined. It not only became easier to build and operate, but it became a more effective "thought worm" implant into our minds.

We make contact with aliens, and in their museums they have an abacus for regular expressions. What does it look like?

This is important to get right, because soon AI will communicate with us using Pixar-quality 3D animation, generated in real time for each conversational turn. Many people still think of AI communication as exchanging "text message" prompts, but for my math research I'm already getting illustrated PDF slide decks as AI's responses to me in single conversational turns. One just has to ask; the form AI communication takes is only limited by our imagination.

Feynman diagrams and the like as rare exceptions, scientific communication is still mired in "telegraph" form, math symbols one reads along lines of text that once lived on physical paper. As future generations adapt to visual symbolic reasoning, the animations AI will use to communicate with us will evolve from representational to abstract art, for a "fatter pipe" pouring symbolic information into our minds. They'll find the "thought worms" that best hack our minds, make us smarter.

I'd love to see what your regex viewer would look like, if you were imagining this future.