Answering biological questions: querying a systems biology database for nutrigenomics

The requirement of systems biology for connecting different levels of biological research leads directly to a need for integrating vast amounts of diverse information in general and of omics data in particular. The nutritional phenotype database addresses this challenge for nutrigenomics. A particularly urgent objective in coping with the data avalanche is making biologically meaningful information accessible to the researcher. This contribution describes how we intend to meet this objective with the nutritional phenotype database. We outline relevant parts of the system architecture, describe the kinds of data managed by it, and show how the system can support retrieval of biologically meaningful information by means of ontologies, full-text queries, and structured queries. Our contribution points out critical points, describes several technical hurdles. It demonstrates how pathway analysis can improve queries and comparisons for nutrition studies. Finally, three directions for future research are given

Paranoid Proof-Number Search

Abstract — Over the years, an increasing number of twoplayer games has been added to the list of solved games. However, solving multi-player games has so far received little, if any, attention. One of the reasons is that while two-player games have a unique game-theoretical value, no unique gametheoretical value may exist in multi-player games as they can have many equilibrium points. We propose solving multi-player games under the paranoid condition. This is equivalent to find the optimal score that a player can achieve independent of the other players ’ strategies. We furthermore introduce and examine an algorithm, called Paranoid Proof-Number Search (PPNS), for solving multi-player games under the paranoid condition. PPNS is tested by solving the 4 × 4 and 6 × 6 variant of the multi-player game Rolit, a multi-player generalization of Reversi (Othello). Our results show that no player can win more than the analytical minimum score in 6 × 6 Rolit while on 4 × 4 Rolit the players are able to score higher. Moreover, the experiments show that for Rolit PPNS is taking advantage of the non-uniformity of the game tree. I

Game-Tree Search Using Proof Numbers: THE FIRST TWENTY YEARS

Solving games is a challenging and attractive task in the domain of Artificial Intelligence. Despite enormous progress, solving increasingly difficult games or game positions continues to pose hard technical challenges. Over the last twenty years, algorithms based on the concept of proof and disproof numbers have become dominating techniques for game solving. Prominent examples include solving the game of checkers to be a draw, and developing checkmate solvers for shogi, which can find mates that take over a thousand moves. This article provides an overview of the research on Proof-Number Search and its many variants and enhancements