Adam Smith’s Unnaturally Natural (nonetheless Naturally Unnatural) use of the Word Natural

Natural and nature are complex words, fraught with ambiguity and contradiction. This paper does not attempt to give a complete account of Smith\u27s use of these words. However, it does demonstrate that Smith did not necessarily approve of what he called natural or nature . Economists and others who assume otherwise are in error. A study, analysis, and/or interpretation of Smith\u27s work which depends upon this (at times unstated) assumption - that Smith necessarily approved of nature or the natural - needs to be read with great care; perhaps even incredulity.

Integrating planning and reactive control

Artificial intelligence research on planning is concerned with designing control systems that choose actions by manipulating explicit descriptions of the world state, the goal to be achieved, and the effects of elementary operations available to the system. Because planning shifts much of the burden of reasoning to the machine, it holds great appeal as a high-level programming method. Experience shows, however, that it cannot be used indiscriminately because even moderately rich languages for describing goals, states, and the elementary operators lead to computational inefficiencies that render the approach unsuitable for realistic applications. This inadequacy has spawned a recent wave of research on reactive control or situated activity in which control systems are modeled as reacting directly to the current situation rather than as reasoning about the future effects of alternative action sequences. While this research has confronted the issue of run-time tractability head on, in many cases it has done so by sacrificing the advantages of declarative planning techniques. Ways in which the two approaches can be unified are discussed. The authors begin by modeling reactive control systems as state machines that map a stream of sensory inputs to a stream of control outputs. These machines can be decomposed into two continuously active subsystems: the planner and the execution module. The planner computes a plan, which can be seen as a set of bits that control the behavior of the execution module. An important element of this work is the formulation of a precise semantic interpretation for the inputs and outputs of the planning system. They show that the distinction between planned and reactive behavior is largely in the eye of the beholder: systems that seem to compute explicit plans can be redescribed in situation-action terms and vice versa. They also discuss practical programming techniques that allow the advantages of declarative programming and guaranteed reactive response to be achieved simultaneously

Computer control study for a manned centrifuge Final technical report

Analog simulation of manned centrifuge capability for production of various gravity levels - centrifuge control syste

(Review) Pierre Force, Self-Interest Before Adam Smith: A Genealogy of Economic Science

Pierre Force, Self-Interest Before Adam Smith: A Genealogy of Economic Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. ix, 279, $65.00. ISBN 0-52183060-5

Adam Smith on the Virtues: A Partial Resolution of the Adam Smith Problem

Adam Smith\u27s definition of justice as a moral virtue based on the passion of resentment in \u27The Theory of Moral Sentiments\u27 (1759), despite seeming contradictions, supports his analysis of an acquisitive, commercial society in \u27The Wealth of Nations\u27 (1774) partly by precluding the concept of a just price

(Review) Self-Interest Before Adam Smith: A Genealogy of Economic Science

Pierre Force, Self-Interest Before Adam Smith: A Genealogy of Economic Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. ix, 279, $65.00. ISBN 0-521 83060-5