Making Sense of a Sequence of Events: A Psychologically Supported AI Implementation

International audiencePeople try to make sense of the usually incomplete reports they receive about events that take place. For doing this, they make use of what they believe the normal course of thing should be. An agent's beliefs may be consonant or dissonant with what is reported. For making sense people usually ascribe different types of relations between events. A prototypical example is the ascription of causality between events. The paper proposes a systematic study of consonance and dissonance between beliefs and reports. The approach is shown to be consistent with findings in psychology. An implementation is presented with some illustrative examples

A reconfigurable hardware membrane system

Abstract P systems are massively parallel systems and software simulations do no usually allow to exploit this parallelism. We present a parallel hardware implementation of a special class of membrane systems. The implementation is based on a universal membrane hardware component that allows to efficiently run membrane systems on specialized hardware such as FPGAs. The implementation is presented in detail as well as performance results and an example.

The outcome-prediction strategy in cases denied certiorari by the U.S. Supreme Court

We investigate whether the substantial use of the outcome-prediction strategy by Supreme Court justices occurs in the petitions denied certiorari by the Court. We show with a computer simulation that [Caldeira, G.A., Wright, J.R., & Zorn, C.J.W. (1999). Journal of Law, Economics and Organization, 15, 549–572], who modeled the missing final votes for denied petitions in order to include them in their study of the use of the outcome-prediction strategy, may have obtained spurious results. Application of the logic of conditional probabilities to the denied petitions suggests that all but those denied by the narrowest of margins are probably considered unacceptable by the justices on non-outcome-oriented grounds, and, therefore, are not subject to use of this strategy. We evaluate the pursuit of the outcome-prediction strategy in petitions that narrowly fail to be granted cert by focusing upon the petitions that are narrowly granted cert and find limited use of the strategy. We conclude that the outcome-prediction strategy probably is little used by the justices in confronting the petitions denied cert and that investigations of the use of this strategy are best confined to those petitions granted cert. Copyright Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2007U.S. Supreme Court, Certiorari, Strategic behavior, Attitudinal model, Rational choice, Selection bias,