Expressiveness of probabilistic modal logics, revisited

Labelled Markov processes are probabilistic versions of labelled transition systems. In general, the state space of a labelled Markov process may be a continuum. Logical characterizations of probabilistic bisimulation and simulation were given by Desharnais et al. These results hold for systems defined on analytic state spaces and assume that there are countably many labels in the case of bisimulation and finitely many labels in the case of simulation. In this paper, we first revisit these results by giving simpler and more streamlined proofs. In particular, our proof for simulation has the same structure as the one for bisimulation, relying on a new result of a topological nature. This departs from the known proof for this result, which uses domain theory techniques and falls out of a theory of approximation of Labelled Markov processes. Both our proofs assume the presence of countably many labels. We investigate the necessity of this assumption, and show that the logical characterization of bisimulation may fail when there are uncountably many labels. However, with a stronger assumption on the transition functions (continuity instead of just measurability), we can regain the logical characterization result, for arbitrarily many labels. These new results arose from a new game-theoretic way of understanding probabilistic simulation and bisimulatio

Communicating answer set programs

Answer set programming i s a form of declarative programming that has proven very successful in succinctly formulating and solving complex problems. Although mechanisms for representing and reasoning with the combined answer set programs of multiple agents have already been proposed, the actual gain in expressivity when adding communication has not been thoroughly studied. We show that allowing simple programs to talk to each other results in the same expressivity as adding negation-as-failure. Furthermore, we show that the ability to focus on one program in a network of simple programs results in the same expressivity as adding disjunction in the head of the rules

Beyond writing: The development of literacy in the Ancient Near East

Previous discussions of the origins of writing in the Ancient Near East have not incorporated the neuroscience of literacy, which suggests that when southern Mesopotamians wrote marks on clay in the late-fourth millennium, they inadvertently reorganized their neural activity, a factor in manipulating the writing system to reflect language, yielding literacy through a combination of neurofunctional change and increased script fidelity to language. Such a development appears to take place only with a sufficient demand for writing and reading, such as that posed by a state-level bureaucracy; the use of a material with suitable characteristics; and the production of marks that are conventionalized, handwritten, simple, and non-numerical. From the perspective of Material Engagement Theory, writing and reading represent the interactivity of bodies, materiality, and brains: movements of hands, arms, and eyes; clay and the implements used to mark it and form characters; and vision, motor planning, object recognition, and language. Literacy is a cognitive change that emerges from and depends upon the nexus of interactivity of the components

A modular approach to defining and characterising notions of simulation

We propose a modular approach to defining notions of simulation, and modal logics which characterise them. We use coalgebras to model state-based systems, relators to define notions of simulation for such systems, and inductive techniques to define the syntax and semantics of modal logics for coalgebras. We show that the expressiveness of an inductively defined logic for coalgebras w.r.t. a notion of simulation follows from an expressivity condition involving one step in the definition of the logic, and the relator inducing that notion of simulation. Moreover, we show that notions of simulation and associated characterising logics for increasingly complex system types can be derived by lifting the operations used to combine system types, to a relational level as well as to a logical level. We use these results to obtain Baltag’s logic for coalgebraic simulation, as well as notions of simulation and associated logics for a large class of non-deterministic and probabilistic systems