293 research outputs found
Planning and scheduling research at NASA Ames Research Center
Planning and scheduling is the area of artificial intelligence research that focuses on the determination of a series of operations to achieve some set of (possibly) interacting goals and the placement of those operations in a timeline that allows them to be accomplished given available resources. Work in this area at the NASA Ames Research Center ranging from basic research in constrain-based reasoning and machine learning, to the development of efficient scheduling tools, to the application of such tools to complex agency problems is described
Characterizing common cause closedness of quantum probability theories
We prove new results on common cause closedness of quantum probability
spaces, where by a quantum probability space is meant the projection lattice of
a non-commutative von Neumann algebra together with a countably additive
probability measure on the lattice. Common cause closedness is the feature that
for every correlation between a pair of commuting projections there exists in
the lattice a third projection commuting with both of the correlated
projections and which is a Reichenbachian common cause of the correlation. The
main result we prove is that a quantum probability space is common cause closed
if and only if it has at most one measure theoretic atom. This result improves
earlier ones published in Z. GyenisZ and M. Redei Erkenntnis 79 (2014) 435-451.
The result is discussed from the perspective of status of the Common Cause
Principle. Open problems on common cause closedness of general probability
spaces are formulated, where is an
orthomodular bounded lattice and is a probability measure on
.Comment: Submitted for publicatio
Interplay between security providers, consumers, and attackers: a weighted congestion game approach
Network users can choose among different security solutions to protect their data. Those solutions are offered by competing providers, with possibly different performance and price levels. In this paper, we model the interactions among users as a noncooperative game, with a negative externality coming from the fact that attackers target popular systems to maximize their expected gain. Using a nonatomic weighted congestion game model for user interactions, we prove the existence and uniqueness of a user equilibrium, compute the corresponding Price of Anarchy, that is the loss of efficiency due to user selfishness, and investigate some consequences for the (higher-level) pricing game played by security providers.Game theory;Weighted games; Security
Plurality Voting under Uncertainty
Understanding the nature of strategic voting is the holy grail of social
choice theory, where game-theory, social science and recently computational
approaches are all applied in order to model the incentives and behavior of
voters.
In a recent paper, Meir et al.[EC'14] made another step in this direction, by
suggesting a behavioral game-theoretic model for voters under uncertainty. For
a specific variation of best-response heuristics, they proved initial existence
and convergence results in the Plurality voting system.
In this paper, we extend the model in multiple directions, considering voters
with different uncertainty levels, simultaneous strategic decisions, and a more
permissive notion of best-response. We prove that a voting equilibrium exists
even in the most general case. Further, any society voting in an iterative
setting is guaranteed to converge.
We also analyze an alternative behavior where voters try to minimize their
worst-case regret. We show that the two behaviors coincide in the simple
setting of Meir et al., but not in the general case.Comment: The full version of a paper from AAAI'15 (to appear
Clarifying and compiling C/C++ concurrency: from C++11 to POWER
The upcoming C and C++ revised standards add concurrency to the languages, for the first time, in the form of a subtle *relaxed memory model* (the *C++11 model*). This aims to permit compiler optimisation and to accommodate the differing relaxed-memory behaviours of mainstream multiprocessors, combining simple semantics for most code with high-performance *low-level atomics* for concurrency libraries. In this paper, we first establish two simpler but provably equivalent models for C++11, one for the full language and another for the subset without consume operations. Subsetting further to the fragment without low-level atomics, we identify a subtlety arising from atomic initialisation and prove that, under an additional condition, the model is equivalent to sequential consistency for race-free programs
Synchronising C/C++ and POWER
Shared memory concurrency relies on synchronisation primitives: compare-and-swap, load-reserve/store-conditional (aka LL/SC), language-level mutexes, and so on. In a sequentially consistent setting, or even in the TSO setting of x86 and Sparc, these have well-understood semantics. But in the very relaxed settings of IBM®, POWER®, ARM, or C/C++, it remains surprisingly unclear exactly what the programmer can depend on.
This paper studies relaxed-memory synchronisation. On the hardware side, we give a clear semantic characterisation of the load-reserve/store-conditional primitives as provided by POWER multiprocessors, for the first time since they were introduced 20 years ago; we cover their interaction with relaxed loads, stores, barriers, and dependencies. Our model, while not officially sanctioned by the vendor, is validated by extensive testing, comparing actual implementation behaviour against an oracle generated from the model, and by detailed discussion with IBM staff. We believe the ARM semantics to be similar.
On the software side, we prove sound a proposed compilation scheme of the C/C++ synchronisation constructs to POWER, including C/C++ spinlock mutexes, fences, and read-modify-write operations, together with the simpler atomic operations for which soundness is already known from our previous work; this is a first step in verifying concurrent algorithms that use load-reserve/store-conditional with respect to a realistic semantics. We also build confidence in the C/C++ model in its own terms, fixing some omissions and contributing to the C standards committee adoption of the C++11 concurrency model
A Hydraulic Approach to Equilibria of Resource Selection Games
Drawing intuition from a (physical) hydraulic system, we present a novel
framework, constructively showing the existence of a strong Nash equilibrium in
resource selection games (i.e., asymmetric singleton congestion games) with
nonatomic players, the coincidence of strong equilibria and Nash equilibria in
such games, and the uniqueness of the cost of each given resource across all
Nash equilibria. Our proofs allow for explicit calculation of Nash equilibrium
and for explicit and direct calculation of the resulting (unique) costs of
resources, and do not hinge on any fixed-point theorem, on the Minimax theorem
or any equivalent result, on linear programming, or on the existence of a
potential (though our analysis does provide powerful insights into the
potential, via a natural concrete physical interpretation). A generalization of
resource selection games, called resource selection games with I.D.-dependent
weighting, is defined, and the results are extended to this family, showing the
existence of strong equilibria, and showing that while resource costs are no
longer unique across Nash equilibria in games of this family, they are
nonetheless unique across all strong Nash equilibria, drawing a novel
fundamental connection between group deviation and I.D.-congestion. A natural
application of the resulting machinery to a large class of
constraint-satisfaction problems is also described.Comment: Hebrew University of Jerusalem Center for the Study of Rationality
discussion paper 67
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