70,158 research outputs found
A Computable Economistās Perspective on Computational Complexity
A computable economist's view of the world of computational complexity theory is described. This means the model of computation underpinning theories of computational complexity plays a central role. The emergence of computational complexity theories from diverse traditions is emphasised. The unifications that emerged in the modern era was codified by means of the notions of efficiency of computations, non-deterministic computations, completeness, reducibility and verifiability - all three of the latter concepts had their origins on what may be called 'Post's Program of Research for Higher Recursion Theory'. Approximations, computations and constructions are also emphasised. The recent real model of computation as a basis for studying computational complexity in the domain of the reals is also presented and discussed, albeit critically. A brief sceptical section on algorithmic complexity theory is included in an appendix
NP-complete Problems and Physical Reality
Can NP-complete problems be solved efficiently in the physical universe? I
survey proposals including soap bubbles, protein folding, quantum computing,
quantum advice, quantum adiabatic algorithms, quantum-mechanical
nonlinearities, hidden variables, relativistic time dilation, analog computing,
Malament-Hogarth spacetimes, quantum gravity, closed timelike curves, and
"anthropic computing." The section on soap bubbles even includes some
"experimental" results. While I do not believe that any of the proposals will
let us solve NP-complete problems efficiently, I argue that by studying them,
we can learn something not only about computation but also about physics.Comment: 23 pages, minor correction
Adposition and Case Supersenses v2.5: Guidelines for English
This document offers a detailed linguistic description of SNACS (Semantic
Network of Adposition and Case Supersenses; Schneider et al., 2018), an
inventory of 50 semantic labels ("supersenses") that characterize the use of
adpositions and case markers at a somewhat coarse level of granularity, as
demonstrated in the STREUSLE corpus (https://github.com/nert-gu/streusle/;
version 4.3 tracks guidelines version 2.5). Though the SNACS inventory aspires
to be universal, this document is specific to English; documentation for other
languages will be published separately.
Version 2 is a revision of the supersense inventory proposed for English by
Schneider et al. (2015, 2016) (henceforth "v1"), which in turn was based on
previous schemes. The present inventory was developed after extensive review of
the v1 corpus annotations for English, plus previously unanalyzed genitive case
possessives (Blodgett and Schneider, 2018), as well as consideration of
adposition and case phenomena in Hebrew, Hindi, Korean, and German. Hwang et
al. (2017) present the theoretical underpinnings of the v2 scheme. Schneider et
al. (2018) summarize the scheme, its application to English corpus data, and an
automatic disambiguation task
Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity
One might think that, once we know something is computable, how efficiently
it can be computed is a practical question with little further philosophical
importance. In this essay, I offer a detailed case that one would be wrong. In
particular, I argue that computational complexity theory---the field that
studies the resources (such as time, space, and randomness) needed to solve
computational problems---leads to new perspectives on the nature of
mathematical knowledge, the strong AI debate, computationalism, the problem of
logical omniscience, Hume's problem of induction, Goodman's grue riddle, the
foundations of quantum mechanics, economic rationality, closed timelike curves,
and several other topics of philosophical interest. I end by discussing aspects
of complexity theory itself that could benefit from philosophical analysis.Comment: 58 pages, to appear in "Computability: G\"odel, Turing, Church, and
beyond," MIT Press, 2012. Some minor clarifications and corrections; new
references adde
- ā¦