Diplomacy - tomada de decisão baseada numa base de dados de movimento

Mestrado em Engenharia de Computadores e TelemáticaDiplomacy is a multiplayer board game, with simultaneous turn-based movements and its game-tree complexity is staggeringly large. Several approaches have been developed to handle this, such as multi-agent systems which seem to be the standard approach. This document describes an implemention of an approach to handle this problem by using stored results in a database to approximate a sub-game perfect equilibrium

Advances in Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a very dynamic area in terms of theory and application. This book brings together many different aspects of the current research on several fields associated to RL which has been growing rapidly, producing a wide variety of learning algorithms for different applications. Based on 24 Chapters, it covers a very broad variety of topics in RL and their application in autonomous systems. A set of chapters in this book provide a general overview of RL while other chapters focus mostly on the applications of RL paradigms: Game Theory, Multi-Agent Theory, Robotic, Networking Technologies, Vehicular Navigation, Medicine and Industrial Logistic

Finding structure in language

Since the Chomskian revolution, it has become apparent that natural language is richly structured, being naturally represented hierarchically, and requiring complex context sensitive rules to define regularities over these representations. It is widely assumed that the richness of the posited structure has strong nativist implications for mechanisms which might learn natural language, since it seemed unlikely that such structures could be derived directly from the observation of linguistic data (Chomsky 1965).This thesis investigates the hypothesis that simple statistics of a large, noisy, unlabelled corpus of natural language can be exploited to discover some of the structure which exists in natural language automatically. The strategy is to initially assume no knowledge of the structures present in natural language, save that they might be found by analysing statistical regularities which pertain between a word and the words which typically surround it in the corpus.To achieve this, various statistical methods are applied to define similarity between statistical distributions, and to infer a structure for a domain given knowledge of the similarities which pertain within it. Using these tools, it is shown that it is possible to form a hierarchical classification of many domains, including words in natural language. When this is done, it is shown that all the major syntactic categories can be obtained, and the classification is both relatively complete, and very much in accord with a standard linguistic conception of how words are classified in natural language.Once this has been done, the categorisation derived is used as the basis of a similar classification of short sequences of words. If these are analysed in a similar way, then several syntactic categories can be derived. These include simple noun phrases, various tensed forms of verbs, and simple prepositional phrases. Once this has been done, the same technique can be applied one level higher, and at this level simple sentences and verb phrases, as well as more complicated noun phrases and prepositional phrases, are shown to be derivable

Unpredictable popular music : history, praxis, perception : cryptography, serialism, pseudorandom generation, chance, improvisation and infinite monkeys.

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

The major and the minor on political aesthetics in the control society

This thesis examines the crucial diagnostic and productive roles that the concepts of minor and major practice, two interrelated modes of cultural production set out by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Kafka: toward a Minor Literature (1975), have to play in the present era of ubiquitous digital technology and informatics that Deleuze himself has influentially described as the control society. In first establishing the conditions of majority and majority, Deleuze and Guattari’s historical focus in Kafka is the early twentieth century period of Franz Kafka’s writing, a period which, for Deleuze, marks the start of a transition between two types of society – the disciplinary society described by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish and the control society that is set apart by its distribution, indifferent technical processes and the replacement of the individual with the dividual in social and political thought. Because of their unique conceptual location, at the transition between societies, the concepts of majority and minority present an essential framework for understanding the impact of ubiquitous digital technology and informatics on cultural production in the twentieth century and beyond. In order to determine the conditions of contemporary major and minor practice across the transition from disciplinary to control societies, the thesis is comprised of two interconnecting threads corresponding to majority and minority respectively. Drawing on the theoretical work of Deleuze and Guattari, Friedrich Kittler and Fredric Jameson alongside pioneering figures in the historical development of computation and informatics (Alan Turing, Claude Shannon and others), material observation on the technical function of digital machines, and the close examination of emblematic cultural forms, I determine the specific conditions of majority that emerge through the development of the contemporary control era. Alongside this delineation of the conditions of majority I examine the prospective tactics, corresponding to the characteristics of minority set out by Deleuze and Guattari in Kafka, which emerge as a contemporary counter-practice within the control-era. This is carried out through the close observation of key examples of cultural production in the fields of literature, film, video, television and the videogame that manifest prospective tactics for a control-era minor practice within the overarching technical characteristics of the control-era major. Through an examination of these interrelated threads the thesis presents a framework for both addressing the significant political and cultural changes that ubiquitous computation effects in constituting the contemporary control society and determining the ways in which these changes can be addressed and countered through cultural production

Perspectives of electroacoustic music : a critical study of the electroacoustic music of Jonathan Harvey, Denis Smalley and Trevor Wishart.

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:D174894 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Living in a natural world

Die Dissertation besteht aus drei Teilen: der erste behandelt Rationalität und deren Bedeutung für alle Fragen des Lebens, nicht nur für einen reduzierten – für wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen reservierten – Teilbereich der Welt; der zweite Teil ist metaphysischer Natur und skizziert den postulierten Aufbau der Welt anhand der im ersten Teil erläuterten Prinzipien. Im dritten Teil frage ich – und gebe vorläufige Antworten – wie die Ergebnisse der vorherigen Teile unseren Blickwinkel auf empfindsame Wesen des Universums – darunter Menschen – ändern. Nur wenn wir rational sind können wir das Maximum an Information aus unserer Umwelt extrahieren. Unser beste Weg zum Erkenntnisgewinn sollte auch Leitfaden für unsere Spiritualität, Ethik, unsere Ansichten über den Sinn des Lebens etc sein. Es ist wichtig die sich mit unserem Erkenntnisstand ändernden Standards der Rationalität auf alle menschlichen Unterfangen anzuwenden. Für Individuen bedeutet Wissen gute mentale Modelle der Welt zu besitzen: je genauer effektive Faktoren in der Welt gespiegelt werden, umso besser können angestrebte Ziele erreicht werden. Unwissenheit führt zu Inaktivität und Passivität. Die Bewährungsprobe für Wissen und Philosophie ist die: werden durch sie die Art und Weise wie wir die Welt, unser Leben, und – letztlich am Wichtigsten – die Art und Weise wie wir handeln, verändert?The thesis consists of three parts: the first being on rationality and its import in tackling all questions facing us in our lives, not only a reduced domain of scientific investigation; the second, metaphysical in nature, forming an essay on the nature of the world, especially as informed by the principles of rationality sketched in the previous part; and the third, applying the findings of the previous sections to sentient agents – among them humans – in this universe. I argue that the rational approach is the best way to approach all questions facing us in our lives. Only by being rational can we extract as much information from our environment as possible. Our best way of gaining knowledge should quite naturally also influence our spirituality, our ethics, our view of the meaning of life and so on. It is important to apply the open standards of rationality to all areas of interest to humans. The agent centric approach is central to the thesis. For individuals, knowledge means having a good mental model of the world: the closer to the actual effective factors in the world, the more potential there is for action leading to achievement of goals. Ignorance condemns one to inaction and passivity. The litmus test for knowledge – and philosophy – is this: does it change the way we view the world, our life, and, ultimately and most importantly, the way we act

Negotiating the frontier between computer-assisted composition and traditional writing : the utility of each and their effective cross-integration

Subventionné en partie par la FRQSCAlors que les ordinateurs ont eu une influence majeure sur la composition musicale, par le biais de la musique électroacoustique et la composition assistée par ordinateur (CAO), il peut exister une division entre ceux qui utilisent surtout des techniques d’écriture traditionnelles (composition intuitive faite à la main) et ceux qui incorporent des éléments algorithmiques dans leur musique. Ce qui suit est une exploration de quelques-unes des façons de créer des points de rencontre plus fluides entre les mondes d’écriture intuitive et la composition assistée par ordinateur, en utilisant certains logiciels et pratiques spécifiques à la composition assistée par ordinateur. Ceux-ci s’étendent des situations où l’ordinateur nous pousse légèrement dans une direction ou fournit un réservoir d’information dans laquelle on peut puiser, jusqu’à des situations où, en se servant des indices de l’usager, l’ordinateur exerce un grand degré de contrôle sur l’information musicale finale. Des œuvres de l'auteur serviront à démontrer l’usage d’un nombre de ces technologies, en conjonction avec des explications plus détaillées de leur incorporation. Une première section ciblera la composition et les techniques de programmation pour l’intégration légère de CAO, reflétant une approche plus intuitive. Les pièces Mutations II, « Waves » et « Run » de Short Pieces on Falling, Never a Moment Lost, et (Let Me Hear) What Maria Hears, parmi d’autres, serviront à démontrer l’efficacité de ces techniques. La deuxième section observera l’intégration moyenne de CAO, démontrée par le système modulaire de progressions de l’auteur. Cette structure, développée en OpenMusic, aide à la génération de progressions musicales, et est facilement adaptable et modifiable pour différentes pièces. Ce système sera examiné principalement par une analyse des œuvres Melodious Viscosity et Like a Square Peg. La troisième et dernière section concerne un niveau élevé d’intégration de CAO par l’intermédiaire des gestes, utilisant le logiciel ScoreScrub de l’auteur. En se servant de ce logiciel, l’usager peut effectivement faire du scrubbing à travers des segments de partitions existants afin de produire de nouveaux passages musicaux. Les œuvres centrales analysées seront Gift efter Carl Herman Erlandsson et la pièce orchestrale, Världen och Jag.While computers have had a major influence on music composition, both through electroacoustic music and computer-assisted composition (CAC), there can remain a divide between those pursuing more traditional writing techniques (intuitive composition done by hand) and those incorporating algorithmic elements in their music. The following is an exploration of some of the ways to produce smoother intersections between the worlds of intuitive writing and computer-assisted composition, through the use of a number of different computer-assisted composition software and practises. These range from situations where the computer provides little more than a gentle nudge or a pool of information from which to draw, to situations where, through the user’s input, the computer exerts a high degree of control on the final musical information. Works by Matthew Lane will demonstrate the use of some of these technologies, alongside detailed explanations of how they were incorporated. A first section will look at composition and programming techniques for low integration of CAC, reflecting a more intuitive approach. The works Mutations II, “Waves” and “Run” from Short Pieces on Falling, Never a Moment Lost, and (Let Me Hear) What Maria Hears, amongst others, will serve to demonstrate the efficiency of these techniques. A second section focuses on medium integration of CAC, as demonstrated by the author’s modular progression management system. This framework, developed in OpenMusic, helps in the generation of progression passages, and is adaptable and easily modified for different works. This framework will be examined primarily through the works Melodious Viscosity and Like a Square Peg. The third and final section looks at high CAC integration through gesture, using the author’s software ScoreScrub. Using this software, the user can effectively “scrub” across existing score samples to produce new musical passages. The primary works analysed will be Gift efter Carl Herman Erlandsson and the orchestral work Världen och jag