Turing's three philosophical lessons and the philosophy of information

In this article, I outline the three main philosophical lessons that we may learn from Turing's work, and how they lead to a new philosophy of information. After a brief introduction, I discuss his work on the method of levels of abstraction (LoA), and his insistence that questions could be meaningfully asked only by specifying the correct LoA. I then look at his second lesson, about the sort of philosophical questions that seem to be most pressing today. Finally, I focus on the third lesson, concerning the new philosophical anthropology that owes so much to Turing's work. I then show how the lessons are learned by the philosophy of information. In the conclusion, I draw a general synthesis of the points made, in view of the development of the philosophy of information itself as a continuation of Turing's work. This journal is © 2012 The Royal Society.Peer reviewe

The Resonance Peak in Sr2_2RuO4_4: Signature of Spin Triplet Pairing

We study the dynamical spin susceptibility, $\chi({\bf q}, \omega)$, in the normal and superconducting state of Sr$_2$RuO$_4$. In the normal state, we find a peak in the vicinity of ${\bf Q}_i\simeq (0.72\pi,0.72\pi)$ in agreement with recent inelastic neutron scattering (INS) experiments. We predict that for spin triplet pairing in the superconducting state a {\it resonance peak} appears in the out-of-plane component of $\chi$, but is absent in the in-plane component. In contrast, no resonance peak is expected for spin singlet pairing.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, final versio

Quantum Optimal Control Theory in the Linear Response Formalism

Quantum optimal control theory (QOCT) aims at finding an external field that drives a quantum system in such a way that optimally achieves some predefined target. In practice this normally means optimizing the value of some observable, a so called merit function. In consequence, a key part of the theory is a set of equations, which provides the gradient of the merit function with respect to parameters that control the shape of the driving field. We show that these equations can be straightforwardly derived using the standard linear response theory, only requiring a minor generalization -- the unperturbed Hamiltonian is allowed to be time-dependent. As a result, the aforementioned gradients are identified with certain response functions. This identification leads to a natural reformulation of QOCT in term of the Keldysh contour formalism of the quantum many-body theory. In particular, the gradients of the merit function can be calculated using the diagrammatic technique for non-equilibrium Green's functions, which should be helpful in the application of QOCT to computationally difficult many-electron problems.Comment: 7 page

Operational distance and fidelity for quantum channels

We define and study a fidelity criterion for quantum channels, which we term the minimax fidelity, through a noncommutative generalization of maximal Hellinger distance between two positive kernels in classical probability theory. Like other known fidelities for quantum channels, the minimax fidelity is well-defined for channels between finite-dimensional algebras, but it also applies to a certain class of channels between infinite-dimensional algebras (explicitly, those channels that possess an operator-valued Radon--Nikodym density with respect to the trace in the sense of Belavkin--Staszewski) and induces a metric on the set of quantum channels which is topologically equivalent to the CB-norm distance between channels, precisely in the same way as the Bures metric on the density operators associated with statistical states of quantum-mechanical systems, derived from the well-known fidelity (`generalized transition probability') of Uhlmann, is topologically equivalent to the trace-norm distance.Comment: 26 pages, amsart.cls; improved intro, fixed typos, added a reference; accepted by J. Math. Phy

Vision-based relative navigation for formation flying of spacecraft

The objective of this paper is to develop a robust and efficient approach for relative navigation and at-titude estimation of spacecraft flying in formation. The approach developed here uses information from a new optical sensor that provides a line of sight vector from the master spacecraft to the secondary satel-lite. The overall system provides a novel, reliable, and autonomous relative navigation and attitude determi-nation system, employing relatively simple electronic circuits with modest digital signal processing require-ments and is fully independent of any external systems. State estimation is achieved through an optimal ob-server design, which is analyzed using a Lyapunov and contraction mapping approach. Simulation results in-dicate that the combined sensor/estimator approach provides accurate relative position and attitude esti-mates

Molecular-orbital-free algorithm for excited states in time-dependent perturbation theory

A non-linear conjugate gradient optimization scheme is used to obtain excitation energies within the Random Phase Approximation (RPA). The solutions to the RPA eigenvalue equation are located through a variational characterization using a modified Thouless functional, which is based upon an asymmetric Rayleigh quotient, in an orthogonalized atomic orbital representation. In this way, the computational bottleneck of calculating molecular orbitals is avoided. The variational space is reduced to the physically-relevant transitions by projections. The feasibility of an RPA implementation scaling linearly with system size, N, is investigated by monitoring convergence behavior with respect to the quality of initial guess and sensitivity to noise under thresholding, both for well- and ill-conditioned problems. The molecular- orbital-free algorithm is found to be robust and computationally efficient providing a first step toward a large-scale, reduced complexity calculation of time-dependent optical properties and linear response. The algorithm is extensible to other forms of time-dependent perturbation theory including, but not limited to, time-dependent Density Functional theory.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figure

Invariance Conditions for Nonlinear Dynamical Systems

Recently, Horv\'ath, Song, and Terlaky [\emph{A novel unified approach to invariance condition of dynamical system, submitted to Applied Mathematics and Computation}] proposed a novel unified approach to study, i.e., invariance conditions, sufficient and necessary conditions, under which some convex sets are invariant sets for linear dynamical systems. In this paper, by utilizing analogous methodology, we generalize the results for nonlinear dynamical systems. First, the Theorems of Alternatives, i.e., the nonlinear Farkas lemma and the \emph{S}-lemma, together with Nagumo's Theorem are utilized to derive invariance conditions for discrete and continuous systems. Only standard assumptions are needed to establish invariance of broadly used convex sets, including polyhedral and ellipsoidal sets. Second, we establish an optimization framework to computationally verify the derived invariance conditions. Finally, we derive analogous invariance conditions without any conditions

Optimal Fleet Composition via Dynamic Programming and Golden Section Search

In this paper, we consider an optimization problem arising in vehicle fleet management. The problem is to construct a heterogeneous vehicle fleet in such a way that cost is minimized subject to a constraint on the overall fleet size. The cost function incorporates fixed and variable costs associated with the fleet, as well as hiring costs that are incurred when vehicle requirements exceed fleet capacity. We first consider the simple case when there is only one type of vehicle. We show that in this case the cost function is convex, and thus the problem can be solved efficiently using the well-known golden section method. We then devise an algorithm, based on dynamic programming and the golden section method, for solving the general problem in which there are multiple vehicle types. We conclude the paper with some simulation results

Nonlinear inverse perturbation method in dynamic analysis

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/76092/1/AIAA-8245-515.pd