Oracles Are Subtle But Not Malicious

Theoretical computer scientists have been debating the role of oracles since the 1970's. This paper illustrates both that oracles can give us nontrivial insights about the barrier problems in circuit complexity, and that they need not prevent us from trying to solve those problems. First, we give an oracle relative to which PP has linear-sized circuits, by proving a new lower bound for perceptrons and low- degree threshold polynomials. This oracle settles a longstanding open question, and generalizes earlier results due to Beigel and to Buhrman, Fortnow, and Thierauf. More importantly, it implies the first nonrelativizing separation of "traditional" complexity classes, as opposed to interactive proof classes such as MIP and MA-EXP. For Vinodchandran showed, by a nonrelativizing argument, that PP does not have circuits of size n^k for any fixed k. We present an alternative proof of this fact, which shows that PP does not even have quantum circuits of size n^k with quantum advice. To our knowledge, this is the first nontrivial lower bound on quantum circuit size. Second, we study a beautiful algorithm of Bshouty et al. for learning Boolean circuits in ZPP^NP. We show that the NP queries in this algorithm cannot be parallelized by any relativizing technique, by giving an oracle relative to which ZPP^||NP and even BPP^||NP have linear-size circuits. On the other hand, we also show that the NP queries could be parallelized if P=NP. Thus, classes such as ZPP^||NP inhabit a "twilight zone," where we need to distinguish between relativizing and black-box techniques. Our results on this subject have implications for computational learning theory as well as for the circuit minimization problem.Comment: 20 pages, 1 figur

La Mosca - Summer 2023

Contributions by: Ilsa Tucker, Mark Behringer, Mason, Timothy Garrison, S.R., Rachel A. Hale, Thalia Piseaux, Philip Kostov, Ja-Hee, Maribel Cruz, David Wales, Jennifer Terry, Megan Benitez, Amina Murati, J.J. Posey, Sophia Leonard, Indigo, Cyn, yarrow yes woods, Jaritza, Scott Andrews, Cean Gamalinda, Michael Cainghug, Hana Urban, Stephanie Ruelas, Ayushi Kumar, Jasmine Rodriguez, Clay Cofre, Emily Flood, Zebulon B. Hurst, jake stephen james, Sergey Turzhanskiy, I Cofre, Dessi Vaevskihttps://neiudc.neiu.edu/lamosca/1000/thumbnail.jp

Marginalizing Risk

A major focus of finance is reducing risk on investments, a goal commonly achieved by dispersing the risk among numerous investors. Sometimes, however, risk dispersion can cause investors to underestimate and under-protect against risk. Risk can even be so widely dispersed that rational investors individually lack the incentive to monitor it. This Article examines the market failures resulting from risk dispersion and analyzes when government regulation may be necessary or appropriate to limit these market failures. The Article also examines how such regulation should be designed,including the extent to which it should limit risk dispersion in the first instance

The Cowl - v.59 - n.20 - Mar 30, 1995

The Cowl - student newspaper of Providence College. Volume 59, Number 20 - March 30, 1995. 24 pages

The Exile\u27s War

In Gaelwyn, the village of a thousand stories, Katchan receives a powerful ruby and an ancient technique called writing hidden by his grandmother, Maggaline. Jealous of the power Katchan has, the village Elder seeks to destroy him. After escaping the Elder, Katchan must leave his home and traverse a dangerous and mysterious wasteland that will lead him directly into an ancient conflict that lost a powerful empire to the sands of time

Mark Carney and the gendered political economy of British central banking

In this article we explore Mark Carney’s place in the gendered political economy of British central banking. We document the gendered narratives surrounding Carney around the time of his appointment as Governor of the Bank of England, suggesting that they worked to naturalise certain gender constructions in finance. We show how Carney seemingly had the ability to successfully embody a combination of two ideal-types of masculinity: both ‘transnational business masculinity’ and ‘traditional bourgeois masculinity’. We argue this contributed to three depoliticising moves, each of which gain their strength in part from the naturalisation of masculinities in finance, while obfuscating important questions of gendered finance. To elucidate the latter, we highlight some of the gendered outcomes that are obscured by the furore surrounding Carney’s character, suggesting that the monetary and financial stability concerns of the Bank under his stewardship are likely to reproduce the uneven and exploitative relations of gendered finance

Computational complexity of the landscape I

We study the computational complexity of the physical problem of finding vacua of string theory which agree with data, such as the cosmological constant, and show that such problems are typically NP hard. In particular, we prove that in the Bousso-Polchinski model, the problem is NP complete. We discuss the issues this raises and the possibility that, even if we were to find compelling evidence that some vacuum of string theory describes our universe, we might never be able to find that vacuum explicitly. In a companion paper, we apply this point of view to the question of how early cosmology might select a vacuum.Comment: JHEP3 Latex, 53 pp, 2 .eps figure

"A zem byla klidná"- světotvorba a topografie v moderním skotském románu

The purpose of this study is to analyse the manner in which contemporary Scottish literature imagines Scotland, especially in the light of the recent political changes in the country, as well as the changes in the perception of its national identity in global terms. The focus will be on the literary representations of the Scottish landscape, following Cairns Craig argument that locality is crucial to Scottish literature and its national imagination. While the fictional rendering of both the rural and urban Scottish landscape might have acted as a 'paradigm of national consciousness' in the past, in contemporary Scottish literature it can now be seen as a form of speculative worldmaking that reflects, satirizes and debates the social and political dispensation of the nation, and aims towards the subversion of the representation of a single Scottish national identity. The texts under consideration all deploy the Scottish social and topographical panorama in a unique manner which results in a literary representation of multiple versions of Scotland that often coexist together. This thesis traces the development of this thematic concern in the contemporary Scots novel from the 1980s to the present through the analysis of the works of three major Scottish contemporary writers: Alasdair Gray, Janice...Cílem této práce je analyzovat představy Skotska v současné skotské literatuře, obzvláště v kontextu nedávných politických změn ve Skotsku, a také změn ve vnímání skotské národní identity celosvětově. Práce se zaměřuje na zobrazení skotské krajiny v literatuře, vycházejíc z Cairnse Craiga, jenž tvrdí, že pro skotskou literaturu a skotskou národní imaginaci je klíčové lokální cítění. Zatímco v minulosti mohlo fiktivní ztvárnění krajiny skotského venkova a města sloužit určitému modelu národního povědomí, v současné skotské literatuře je spíše záležitostí spekulativní "světotvorby", jež reflektuje a satirizuje sociální a politické zřízení skotského národa a jejímž cílem je zpochybnit jednolitost skotské národní identity. Skotské sociální a topografické panorama je ve všech rozebraných textech natolik unikátní, že výsledkem je zobrazení několika koexistujících verzí Skotska. Tato práce sleduje vývoj tohoto tematického aspektu ve skotském románu od osmdesátých let minulého století až do současnosti a zamřuje se na dílo tří významných skotských autorů: Alasdaira Graye, Janice Gallowayové a Iaina M. Bankse. První kapitola se věnuje teoretickým východiskům, na jejichž základě je provedena literární analýza. Nejprve se diskutuje vztah mezi "národními identitami a kulturními rámci, v nichž jsou tyto...Ústav anglofonních literatur a kulturDepartment of Anglophone Literatures and CulturesFilozofická fakultaFaculty of Art