On the Inferential Zigzag and Its Activation Towards Clarifying What It Is Commonsense Reasoning

This paper has a twofold goal: The first is to study how the inferential zigzag can be activated, even computationally, trying to analyse what kind of reasoning consists of, where its ’mechanism’ is rooted, how it can be activated since without all this it can just seem a metaphysical idea. The second, not so deeply different - as it can be presumed at a first view - but complementary, is to explore the subject’s link with the old thought on conjectures of the 15th Century Theologist and Philosopher Nicolaus Cusanus who was the first thinker consciously and extensively using conjectures

‎On the Inferential Zigzag and Its Activation Towards Clarifying What It Is Commonsense Reasoning

This paper has a twofold goal‎: ‎The first is to study how the inferential zigzag can be activated‎, ‎even computationally‎, ‎trying to analyse what kind of reasoning consists of‎, ‎where its 'mechanism' is rooted‎, ‎how it can be activated since without all this it can just seem a metaphysical idea‎. ‎The second‎, ‎not so deeply different‎ - ‎as it can be presumed at a first view‎ - ‎but complementary‎, ‎is to explore the subject's link with the old thought on conjectures of the 15th Century Theologist and Philosopher Nicolaus Cusanus‎ ‎who was the first thinker consciously and extensively using conjectures‎

Verso le Città Cognitive. Un esempio di classificatore fuzzy: il bot parcheggiatore

Le città cognitive (Portmann, Seising e Tabacchi, 2017) sono una possibile evoluzione delle smart cities (Portmann e Fingers, 2016). Nella progettazione di una città cognitiva si tiene conto, oltre che della rete di sensori ed attuatori che contribuiscono alla condivisione dei dati, anche del rapporto tra la città ed il cittadino; a questo fine sono utilizzate una serie di tecnologie proprie della Computational Intelligence (Kacprzyk e Pedrycz, 2015), quali Metaeuristiche, Algoritmi evolutivi e genetici e metodologie Soft Computing per includere nel dialogo non solo vaste moli di dati, ma la possibilità di analisi introspettive che utilizzino come interfaccia da e verso gli utenti i linguaggi naturali e le logiche imprecise (Perticone e Tabacchi, 2016, D’Asaro et al., 2017). In questo lavoro presentiamo un esempio schematico di assistente virtuale basato sui classificatori a regole fuzzy (Magdalena, 2015), che utilizza ed integra gli open data prodotti dalla smart city con metodi linguistici per la classificazione al fine di indicare all’utente la convenienza nella scelta di un parcheggio in una realtà non conosciuta

John Horton Conway

Matematico inglese, e tanto altro. Verrà certamente ricordato per il gioco della vita: terrore dei primi sistemisti per la sottrazione di prezioso tempo macchina a lavori più “seri”; geniale invenzione ai confini tra matematica e informatica, tra teoria del caos e gioco; un insieme di regole limitate e comprensibili che sorprendentemente danno vita ad un sistema con il potere di una macchina di Turing uni- versale, che ancora oggi produce interessanti spunti di ricerca in settori scientifici tanto diversi quali la biologia e la fisica, l’economia e la biochimica

Logics for Cognitive Sciences: how questions arising from Cognitive Sciences could benefit from a logic approach

Cognitive Sciences can be seen as one of the paradigms that have replaced each other along the last seventy years, in order to promote interdisciplinarity. Logic in Cognitive Sciences presents itself with a double role: as a formal tool for studying and modelling some problems and questions, as well as a topic to be understood in itself. In this contribution some brief hints at where in Cognitive Science a tighter, more imprecise Logic should apply are given

Omaggio a Penrose

Fine teorico, e profondo conoscitore della mente umana e delle sue relazioni con le strutture naturali, Penrose ha però un posto nel cuore degli artisti, dei grafici e degli architetti almeno per due costruzioni grafiche che portano il suo nome

Logic and Computational Aspects of Computing with Speculations

A novel, alternative approach to the fundamental logic of common- sense reasoning extending the concepts put forward by Lotfi A. Zadeh’s Computing with Words has been recently advanced by Enric Trillas, based on the idea that in order to allow for creativity in automated reasoning, the standard operations of inducing and abducing must be complemented by guessing, or speculating. In this paper, after a recall of Trillas’ skeleton formal model, a reflection is made on the computational aspects of such approach. As computational complexity of such approach generally increases exponentially, hints are given on how to tackle such growth and render more manageable the mechanisation of commonsense reasoning

“The human use of human beings”: Interdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity and all that in biophysics and beyond

Biophysics, just by looking at its name, indicates an interdisciplinary scientific activity, although the notion of interdisciplinarity, as such, seems to be not widely or specifically discussed by biophysicists. The same seems to have happened as well in the early stages of the development of cybernetics, notably in Norbert Wiener's writings. This situation seems to contrast with what has happened in subsequent developments of cybernetics ideas, notably in general system theory and cognitive sciences. After a few general reflections on the notion of interdisciplinarity, its sophisticated variants and the path leading to the birth of cognitive science, we shall refer to Wiener's thought to extracts aspects and indications that could be useful today, also for what concerns the social responsibility of scientists, which could be seen as stemming from a very general form of interdisciplinarity. Highlights: After a few general reflections on the notion of interdisciplinarity, its sophisticated variants and the path leading to the birth of cognitive science, we shall refer to Wiener's thought to extracts aspects and indications that could be useful today, also for what concerns the social responsibility of scientists

Enrique Hector Ruspini, PhD (1942-2019)

Enrique Hector Ruspini, who passed away on October 15, 2019, after a long illness, was one of the first and of the most constant contributors in the field of Soft Computing

Birkhoff's aesthetics, Arnheim's entropy. Some remarks on complexity and fuzzy entropy in arts

A judgement of aesthetic in arts is, by sheer consensus, a daunting task that requires evaluation of a whole host of endogenous and exogenous cultural factors. A few of them can actually provide very useful hints in tackling foundational problems in Information Science in a more natural setting than what is usually provided by a typical engineering stance. This interaction can however work the other way about, as instruments from the Information and Computer Science toolkit may help in focusing the less explored features of art and its evaluation. When all the social, historical, hermeneutical and political considerations are stripped from the living flesh of the piece, we lose most of what differentiates creation from description. This notwithstanding, or maybe exactly for this reason, measuring structures is still an important element of artistic judgement, and the folk concept that beauty stems from some sort of order/chaos relationship, formalized by G. D. Birkhoff as the aesthetic measure, requires an adequate and consistent quantiï¬cation of both factors. Old and new approaches to the problem generally resort to classical deï¬nitions of information and entropy (Shannon entropy, Kolmogorov-Solomonoff complexity) and their derivatives, neglecting the fact that compactness and repetition have a different value in arts than in information theory, a “confusion of our languages” already noted by R. Arnheim. In this paper we discuss a tiny fragment of the general and wide mesh of interactions between information sciences and humanities: a possible, fruitful interaction among such different topics as fuzziness and art, dealing with similarities and differences in measuring fuzziness and information, and the relationship between the informal notion of information and the measures of fuzziness