Learning the Designer's Preferences to Drive Evolution

This paper presents the Designer Preference Model, a data-driven solution that pursues to learn from user generated data in a Quality-Diversity Mixed-Initiative Co-Creativity (QD MI-CC) tool, with the aims of modelling the user's design style to better assess the tool's procedurally generated content with respect to that user's preferences. Through this approach, we aim for increasing the user's agency over the generated content in a way that neither stalls the user-tool reciprocal stimuli loop nor fatigues the user with periodical suggestion handpicking. We describe the details of this novel solution, as well as its implementation in the MI-CC tool the Evolutionary Dungeon Designer. We present and discuss our findings out of the initial tests carried out, spotting the open challenges for this combined line of research that integrates MI-CC with Procedural Content Generation through Machine Learning.Comment: 16 pages, Accepted and to appear in proceedings of the 23rd European Conference on the Applications of Evolutionary and bio-inspired Computation, EvoApplications 202

GOVERNMENT POLICIES AND THEIR EFFECTS ON RESOURCE USE IN THE U.S. GRAIN AND OILSEED SECTORS

Three policies widely used by governments around the world--market price supports, direct payments, and input subsidies--are analyzed for their implications for resource use and effectiveness in transferring income to growers. Results indicate that direct payments are the most effective while input subsidies are least effective in transferring income to farmers. All policies result in expanded input use with input subsidies having the largest effect while direct payments have the least impact.Agricultural and Food Policy,

Agricultural Trade Liberalization: Implications for Productive Factors in the U.S.

This report presents preliminary results of impacts on factors of production in the United States, following reductions in assistance to agriculture. Analysis was conducted by modifying the production structure of the U.S. country model in SWOPSIM to explicitly include inputs employed by agriculture. The results indicate that it is important to adequately model the production technology and include inputs, otherwise simulation results may not capture the impact of liberalization on input use and may not adequately represent changes in producer income.International Relations/Trade,

ECONOMIC ANALYSIS OF COTTON INTEGRATED PEST MANAGEMENT STRATEGIES

Crop Production/Industries,

ECONOMIC ANALYSIS OF COTTON INTEGRATED PEST MANAGEMENT STRATEGIES: REPLY

Crop Production/Industries,

"Nothing that is not Zeus" the unknowability of the Gods and the limits of human knowledge in Sophoclean tragedy

In the present thesis the author professes to offer neither a systematic account of Sophoclean theology (if indeed there is such a thing) nor a study of the epistemological problem per se in Sophoclean tragedy. His purpose is rather to illuminate - partly expanding on a brief but suggestive study by Hans Diller ("Gottliches und menschliches Wissen bei Sophocles", Kiel 1950) - the ways in which the epistemological chasm between Man and God in Sophoclean tragedy becomes manifest through a 'collision' between the incompleteness and limitedness of human knowledge on the one hand and the transcendence and the unknowability of the gods on the other. An introductory chapter is prefixed which deals with the development of the idea of divine unknowability in archaic Greek literature and in Presocratic philosophy. There follows a detailed examination of the extant plays one by one (with special emphasis on the close reading of practically all the choral odes), by means of which the author endeavours to demonstrate that the centrality of the epistemological problem (in relation, always, to the inscrutability of the Godhead) in Sophocles, far from reducing his dramas to abstract philosophical treatises, contains a tremendous tragic potential and makes for powerful plays. Aspects of each play's structure, of its thematic articulation and of its vocabulary are studied, while a variety of methodological approaches are employed in order to illuminate problems of interpretation. All important secondary literature is cited and / or discussed. Thus, while never losing sight of its central concern (divine unknowability, limitedness of human knowledge), the present thesis also aims to be a thorough study of Sophoclean tragedy as a whole