Understanding analogical reasoning : viewpoints from psychology and related disciplines

Analogy and metaphor have a long history of study in linguistics, education, philosophy and psychology. Consensus over what analogy is or how analogy functions in language and thought, however, has been elusive. This paper, the first in a two part series, examines these various research traditions, attempting to bring out major lines of agreement over the role of analogy in individual human experience. As well as being a general literature review which may be helpful for newcomers to the study of analogy, this paper attempts to extract from these literatures existing theories, models and concepts which may be interesting or useful for computational studies of analogical reasoning

Transformation of a word model to a geometric space description

On the basis of the Agent-action-Objective (AaO) paradigm, it will be shown how the transformation of a word model to a geometric space description can be made the founda¬tion for an approach to informational invariants. In particular, the word model of a Causal Loop Diagram (CLD) has been used for simplifying the involved procedures. Since the explanation of a causal loop requires a verbal description of what is in the links, this kind of discourse is necessarily dependent on its producer’s intention and orientation. Both can be discovered through the functional geometry of non-linearly working language mechanisms. Although covered by textual surface properties, corresponding language spaces are approachable with VERTEX, which is a new version of Perspective Text Analysis (PTA). Moreover, reproduced order parameters are the result of the strict dependencies, which are characteristic of the entangled [AaO] units of the (AaO) model. Relative phase stability in the developing variables (a) of the A-component and (b) of the O-component of the model has revealed that VERTEX has the capacity to manifest the structural symmetry of the emerging A- and O-strands. Furthermore, the overall symmetry of the strands is a consequence of apparent super-string disparity, which has important theoretical implications

Applying Formal Methods to Networking: Theory, Techniques and Applications

Despite its great importance, modern network infrastructure is remarkable for the lack of rigor in its engineering. The Internet which began as a research experiment was never designed to handle the users and applications it hosts today. The lack of formalization of the Internet architecture meant limited abstractions and modularity, especially for the control and management planes, thus requiring for every new need a new protocol built from scratch. This led to an unwieldy ossified Internet architecture resistant to any attempts at formal verification, and an Internet culture where expediency and pragmatism are favored over formal correctness. Fortunately, recent work in the space of clean slate Internet design---especially, the software defined networking (SDN) paradigm---offers the Internet community another chance to develop the right kind of architecture and abstractions. This has also led to a great resurgence in interest of applying formal methods to specification, verification, and synthesis of networking protocols and applications. In this paper, we present a self-contained tutorial of the formidable amount of work that has been done in formal methods, and present a survey of its applications to networking.Comment: 30 pages, submitted to IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial

The AaO as building block in the coupling of text kinematics with the resonating structure of a metaphor

This article presents a study of the metaphor as instrument for the direct perception of events. Its major hypothesis refers to the event structure embedded in the ground of a metaphor. Since the ground is implicit in the linguistic manifestation, an invariant representation of textual movement patterns is assumed to capture the event structure. Experimentally, it is demonstrated that an event is perceivable only through structure. To capture the event means to conserve its structure. As a result, it is demonstrated that the functional symmetry of a metaphor can be established in the form of attractors evolving in state spaces

Analyzing Array Manipulating Programs by Program Transformation

We explore a transformational approach to the problem of verifying simple array-manipulating programs. Traditionally, verification of such programs requires intricate analysis machinery to reason with universally quantified statements about symbolic array segments, such as "every data item stored in the segment A[i] to A[j] is equal to the corresponding item stored in the segment B[i] to B[j]." We define a simple abstract machine which allows for set-valued variables and we show how to translate programs with array operations to array-free code for this machine. For the purpose of program analysis, the translated program remains faithful to the semantics of array manipulation. Based on our implementation in LLVM, we evaluate the approach with respect to its ability to extract useful invariants and the cost in terms of code size