6,996 research outputs found
The Ship of Theseus Puzzle
Does the Ship of Theseus present a genuine puzzle about persistence due to conflicting intuitions based on “continuity of form” and “continuity of matter” pulling in opposite directions? Philosophers are divided. Some claim that it presents a genuine puzzle but disagree over whether there is a solution. Others claim that there is no puzzle at all since the case has an obvious solution. To assess these proposals, we conducted a cross-cultural study involving nearly 3,000 people across twenty-two countries, speaking eighteen different languages. Our results speak against the proposal that there is no puzzle at all and against the proposal that there is a puzzle but one that has no solution. Our results suggest that there are two criteria—“continuity of form” and “continuity of matter”— that constitute our concept of persistence and these two criteria receive different weightings in settling matters concerning persistence
An Expressive Language and Efficient Execution System for Software Agents
Software agents can be used to automate many of the tedious, time-consuming
information processing tasks that humans currently have to complete manually.
However, to do so, agent plans must be capable of representing the myriad of
actions and control flows required to perform those tasks. In addition, since
these tasks can require integrating multiple sources of remote information ?
typically, a slow, I/O-bound process ? it is desirable to make execution as
efficient as possible. To address both of these needs, we present a flexible
software agent plan language and a highly parallel execution system that enable
the efficient execution of expressive agent plans. The plan language allows
complex tasks to be more easily expressed by providing a variety of operators
for flexibly processing the data as well as supporting subplans (for
modularity) and recursion (for indeterminate looping). The executor is based on
a streaming dataflow model of execution to maximize the amount of operator and
data parallelism possible at runtime. We have implemented both the language and
executor in a system called THESEUS. Our results from testing THESEUS show that
streaming dataflow execution can yield significant speedups over both
traditional serial (von Neumann) as well as non-streaming dataflow-style
execution that existing software and robot agent execution systems currently
support. In addition, we show how plans written in the language we present can
represent certain types of subtasks that cannot be accomplished using the
languages supported by network query engines. Finally, we demonstrate that the
increased expressivity of our plan language does not hamper performance;
specifically, we show how data can be integrated from multiple remote sources
just as efficiently using our architecture as is possible with a
state-of-the-art streaming-dataflow network query engine
saprEMo: a simplified algorithm for predicting detections of electromagnetic transients in surveys
The multi-wavelength detection of GW170817 has inaugurated multi-messenger
astronomy. The next step consists in interpreting observations coming from
population of gravitational wave sources. We introduce saprEMo, a tool aimed at
predicting the number of electromagnetic signals characterised by a specific
light curve and spectrum, expected in a particular sky survey. By looking at
past surveys, saprEMo allows us to constrain models of electromagnetic emission
or event rates. Applying saprEMo to proposed astronomical missions/observing
campaigns provides a perspective on their scientific impact and tests the
effect of adopting different observational strategies. For our first case
study, we adopt a model of spindown-powered X-ray emission predicted for a
binary neutron star merger producing a long-lived neutron star. We apply
saprEMo on data collected by XMM-Newton and Chandra and during s of
observations with the mission concept THESEUS. We demonstrate that our emission
model and binary neutron star merger rate imply the presence of some signals in
the XMM-Newton catalogs. We also show that the new class of X-ray transients
found by Bauer et al. in the Chandra Deep Field-South is marginally consistent
with the expected rate. Finally, by studying the mission concept THESEUS, we
demonstrate the substantial impact of a much larger field of view in searches
of X-ray transients
CHORUS Deliverable 3.3: Vision Document - Intermediate version
The goal of the CHORUS vision document is to create a high level vision on audio-visual search engines in order to give guidance to the future R&D work in this area (in line with the mandate of CHORUS as a Coordination Action).
This current intermediate draft of the CHORUS vision document (D3.3) is based on the previous CHORUS vision documents D3.1 to D3.2 and on the results of the six CHORUS Think-Tank meetings held in March, September and November 2007 as well as in April, July and October 2008, and on the feedback from other CHORUS events.
The outcome of the six Think-Thank meetings will not just be to the benefit of the participants which are stakeholders and experts from academia and industry – CHORUS, as a coordination action of the EC, will feed back the findings (see Summary) to the projects under its purview and, via its website, to the whole community working in the domain of AV content search.
A few subjections of this deliverable are to be completed after the eights (and presumably last) Think-Tank meeting in spring 2009
The Wonder of Colors and the Principle of Ariadne
The Principle of Ariadne, formulated in 1988 ago by Walter Carnielli
and Carlos Di Prisco and later published in 1993, is an infinitary principle that is independent of the Axiom of Choice in ZF, although it can be consistently added to
the remaining ZF axioms. The present paper surveys, and motivates, the foundational importance of the Principle of Ariadne
and proposes the Ariadne Game, showing that the Principle of Ariadne,
corresponds precisely
to a winning strategy for the Ariadne Game. Some relations to other
alternative. set-theoretical principles
are also briefly discussed
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