Constraint Satisfaction Techniques for Combinatorial Problems

The last two decades have seen extraordinary advances in tools and techniques for constraint satisfaction. These advances have in turn created great interest in their industrial applications. As a result, tools and techniques are often tailored to meet the needs of industrial applications out of the box. We claim that in the case of abstract combinatorial problems in discrete mathematics, the standard tools and techniques require special considerations in order to be applied effectively. The main objective of this thesis is to help researchers in discrete mathematics weave through the landscape of constraint satisfaction techniques in order to pick the right tool for the job. We consider constraint satisfaction paradigms like satisfiability of Boolean formulas and answer set programming, and techniques like symmetry breaking. Our contributions range from theoretical results to practical issues regarding tool applications to combinatorial problems. We prove search-versus-decision complexity results for problems about backbones and backdoors of Boolean formulas. We consider applications of constraint satisfaction techniques to problems in graph arrowing (specifically in Ramsey and Folkman theory) and computational social choice. Our contributions show how applying constraint satisfaction techniques to abstract combinatorial problems poses additional challenges. We show how these challenges can be addressed. Additionally, we consider the issue of trusting the results of applying constraint satisfaction techniques to combinatorial problems by relying on verified computations

Fraisse Limits, Ramsey Theory, and Topological Dynamics of Automorphism Groups

We study in this paper some connections between the Fraisse theory of amalgamation classes and ultrahomogeneous structures, Ramsey theory, and topological dynamics of automorphism groups of countable structures.Comment: 73 pages, LaTeX 2e, to appear in Geom. Funct. Ana

LIPIcs, Volume 251, ITCS 2023, Complete Volume

LIPIcs, Volume 251, ITCS 2023, Complete Volum

An Agreement with Reality: The Poetry of Logical Modernism.

In the early twentieth century, the nascent analytic philosophy turned away from idealism and towards a distinctively modern realism. An Agreement with Reality contends that modern, Transatlantic poetry can and should be read in that context. This dissertation concatenates rarely juxtaposed poets, critics and philosophers, delineating a logical modernism defined by three criteria: 1) preoccupation with the nature of literary truth and literary fact where truth is defined as “agreement with reality,” 2) poetic engagement with Neo-Kantian aesthetic philosophy, and 3) anxieties about making, mourning, or dismantling a comprehensive theory of everything that would reconcile the truths of aesthetic discourses with those of science and philosophy. Reading William Empson, Laura (Riding) Jackson, I.A. Richards, Gertrude Stein, and Wallace Stevens in conjunction with Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, I show how logical modernism acts as a complex of epistemic virtues informing the interpretation and production of modern poetry. I challenge the truism that Continental and pragmatist strains of schools of thought are the only species of philosophy relevant to literary studies and also reveal under-theorized points of continuity between Romantic and modern aesthetics. Chapter One considers early close readers’ responses to the finale of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” Concerns about how these lines agree with reality expose modern close reading’s self-fashioning use of the terms of logical discourse, anxieties resurrected in contemporary criticism by Franco Moretti’s “distant reading.” Stein’s mediation between pragmatist and logical agreements with reality occupies Chapter Two. I concentrate on two poetic sequences, I Can Feel The Beauty and the “long dull poem” Stanzas in Meditation, contending that Stein employs linked strategies of multiple reference and naming without naming to unsettle the concept of literary fact. Chapter Three examines Stevens’s formulation of poetry as “an agreement with reality brought about by the imagination,” reflecting on the “bad aesthetics” of a long poem called Esthétique du Mal in which poetry acts as elegy for a theory of everything. Employing archival and theoretical frameworks, I offer a cultural history of, in Susan Howe’s words, the “secret affinity” between logic and poetry.PHDEnglish Language and LiteratureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/109047/1/raporte_1.pd

LIPIcs, Volume 261, ICALP 2023, Complete Volume

LIPIcs, Volume 261, ICALP 2023, Complete Volum

PSA 2016

These preprints were automatically compiled into a PDF from the collection of papers deposited in PhilSci-Archive in conjunction with the PSA 2016