Logic and Automata

Mathematical logic and automata theory are two scientific disciplines with a fundamentally close relationship. The authors of Logic and Automata take the occasion of the sixtieth birthday of Wolfgang Thomas to present a tour d'horizon of automata theory and logic. The twenty papers in this volume cover many different facets of logic and automata theory, emphasizing the connections to other disciplines such as games, algorithms, and semigroup theory, as well as discussing current challenges in the field

Inductive Pattern Formation

With the extended computational limits of algorithmic recursion, scientific investigation is transitioning away from computationally decidable problems and beginning to address computationally undecidable complexity. The analysis of deductive inference in structure-property models are yielding to the synthesis of inductive inference in process-structure simulations. Process-structure modeling has examined external order parameters of inductive pattern formation, but investigation of the internal order parameters of self-organization have been hampered by the lack of a mathematical formalism with the ability to quantitatively define a specific configuration of points. This investigation addressed this issue of quantitative synthesis. Local space was developed by the Poincare inflation of a set of points to construct neighborhood intersections, defining topological distance and introducing situated Boolean topology as a local replacement for point-set topology. Parallel development of the local semi-metric topological space, the local semi-metric probability space, and the local metric space of a set of points provides a triangulation of connectivity measures to define the quantitative architectural identity of a configuration and structure independent axes of a structural configuration space. The recursive sequence of intersections constructs a probabilistic discrete spacetime model of interacting fields to define the internal order parameters of self-organization, with order parameters external to the configuration modeled by adjusting the morphological parameters of individual neighborhoods and the interplay of excitatory and inhibitory point sets. The evolutionary trajectory of a configuration maps the development of specific hierarchical structure that is emergent from a specific set of initial conditions, with nested boundaries signaling the nonlinear properties of local causative configurations. This exploration of architectural configuration space concluded with initial process-structure-property models of deductive and inductive inference spaces. In the computationally undecidable problem of human niche construction, an adaptive-inductive pattern formation model with predictive control organized the bipartite recursion between an information structure and its physical expression as hierarchical ensembles of artificial neural network-like structures. The union of architectural identity and bipartite recursion generates a predictive structural model of an evolutionary design process, offering an alternative to the limitations of cognitive descriptive modeling. The low computational complexity of these models enable them to be embedded in physical constructions to create the artificial life forms of a real-time autonomously adaptive human habitat

Machine

In today’s society of humans and machines, automation, animation, and ecosystems are terms of concern. Categories of life and technology have become mixed in governmental policies and drive economic exploitation and the pathologies of everyday life. This book both curiously and critically advances the term that underlies these new developments: machine. Contents: Introduction: Un/Civil Engineering (Thomas Pringle); Animation of the Technical and the Quest for Beauty (Gertrud Koch); For a Neganthropology of Automatic Society (Bernard Stiegler); The Ecosystem Is an Apparatus: From Machinic Ecology to the Politics of Resilience (Thomas Pringle)

Noise and morphogenesis: Uncertainty, randomness and control

This thesis presents a processual ontology of noise by virtue of which morphogenesis (in its most general understanding as the processes by which order/form is created) must be instantiated. Noise is here outlined as the far from equilibrium environment out of which metastable temporary ‘solutions’ can emerge as the system transitions through the pre-individual state space. While frequently addressed by humanities and arts studies on the basis of its supposed disruptive character (often in terms of aesthetics), this thesis aims to thoroughly examine noise’s conceptual potencies. To explore and amplify the epistemic consequences not merely of the ineliminability of noise but of its originative power as well as within the course of the elimination of givenness by epistemology. This philosophical work is informed by many different fields of contemporary science (namely: statistical physics, information theory, probability theory, 4E cognition, synthetic biology, nonlinear dynamics, complexity science and computer science) in order to assess and highlight the problems of the metascientific and ideological foundations of diverse projects of prediction and control of uncertainty. From algorithmic surveillance back to cybernetics and how these rendered noise “informationally heretical”. This conveys an analysis of how contemporary prediction technologies are dramatically transforming our relationship with the future and with uncertainty in a great number of our social structures. It is a philosophico-critical anthropology of data ontology and a critique of reductive pan-info-computationalism. Additionally, two practical examples of noise characterised as an enabling constraint for the functioning of complex adaptive systems are presented. These are at once biophysical and cognitive, : 1) interaction-dominance constituted by ‘pink noise’ and 2) noise as a source of variability that cells may exploit in (synthetic) biology. Finally, noise is posited as an intractable active ontological randomness that limits the scope of determinism and that goes beyond unpredictability in any epistemological sense due to the insuperability of the situation in which epistemology finds itself following the critique of the given

Machine

In today’s society of humans and machines, automation, animation, and ecosystems are terms of concern. Categories of life and technology have become mixed in governmental policies and drive economic exploitation and the pathologies of everyday life. This book both curiously and critically advances the term that underlies these new developments: machine

Advanced Automation for Space Missions

The feasibility of using machine intelligence, including automation and robotics, in future space missions was studied