A New Kind of Finance

Finance has benefited from the Wolfram's NKS approach but it can and will benefit even more in the future, and the gains from the influence may actually be concentrated among practitioners who unintentionally employ those principles as a group.Comment: 13 pages; Forthcoming in "Irreducibility and Computational Equivalence: 10 Years After Wolfram's A New Kind of Science," Hector Zenil, ed., Springer Verlag, 201

Approximations of algorithmic and structural complexity validate cognitive-behavioral experimental results

Being able to objectively characterize the intrinsic complexity of behavioral patterns resulting from human or animal decisions is fundamental for deconvolving cognition and designing autonomous artificial intelligence systems. Yet complexity is difficult in practice, particularly when strings are short. By numerically approximating algorithmic (Kolmogorov) complexity (K), we establish an objective tool to characterize behavioral complexity. Next, we approximate structural (Bennett’s Logical Depth) complexity (LD) to assess the amount of computation required for generating a behavioral string. We apply our toolbox to three landmark studies of animal behavior of increasing sophistication and degree of environmental influence, including studies of foraging communication by ants, flight patterns of fruit flies, and tactical deception and competition (e.g., predator-prey) strategies. We find that ants harness the environmental condition in their internal decision process, modulating their behavioral complexity accordingly. Our analysis of flight (fruit flies) invalidated the common hypothesis that animals navigating in an environment devoid of stimuli adopt a random strategy. Fruit flies exposed to a featureless environment deviated the most from Levy flight, suggesting an algorithmic bias in their attempt to devise a useful (navigation) strategy. Similarly, a logical depth analysis of rats revealed that the structural complexity of the rat always ends up matching the structural complexity of the competitor, with the rats’ behavior simulating algorithmic randomness. Finally, we discuss how experiments on how humans perceive randomness suggest the existence of an algorithmic bias in our reasoning and decision processes, in line with our analysis of the animal experiments. This contrasts with the view of the mind as performing faulty computations when presented with randomized items. In summary, our formal toolbox objectively characterizes external constraints on putative models of the “internal” decision process in humans and animals

Algorithmic Complexity for Short Binary Strings Applied to Psychology: A Primer

Since human randomness production has been studied and widely used to assess executive functions (especially inhibition), many measures have been suggested to assess the degree to which a sequence is random-like. However, each of them focuses on one feature of randomness, leading authors to have to use multiple measures. Here we describe and advocate for the use of the accepted universal measure for randomness based on algorithmic complexity, by means of a novel previously presented technique using the the definition of algorithmic probability. A re-analysis of the classical Radio Zenith data in the light of the proposed measure and methodology is provided as a study case of an application.Comment: To appear in Behavior Research Method

A Behavioural Foundation for Natural Computing and a Programmability Test

What does it mean to claim that a physical or natural system computes? One answer, endorsed here, is that computing is about programming a system to behave in different ways. This paper offers an account of what it means for a physical system to compute based on this notion. It proposes a behavioural characterisation of computing in terms of a measure of programmability, which reflects a system's ability to react to external stimuli. The proposed measure of programmability is useful for classifying computers in terms of the apparent algorithmic complexity of their evolution in time. I make some specific proposals in this connection and discuss this approach in the context of other behavioural approaches, notably Turing's test of machine intelligence. I also anticipate possible objections and consider the applicability of these proposals to the task of relating abstract computation to nature-like computation.Comment: 37 pages, 4 figures. Based on an invited Talk at the Symposium on Natural/Unconventional Computing and its Philosophical Significance, Alan Turing World Congress 2012, Birmingham, UK. http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13347-012-0095-2 Ref. glitch fixed in 2nd. version; Philosophy & Technology (special issue on History and Philosophy of Computing), Springer, 201

On environment difficulty and discriminating power

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10458-014-9257-1This paper presents a way to estimate the difficulty and discriminating power of any task instance. We focus on a very general setting for tasks: interactive (possibly multiagent) environments where an agent acts upon observations and rewards. Instead of analysing the complexity of the environment, the state space or the actions that are performed by the agent, we analyse the performance of a population of agent policies against the task, leading to a distribution that is examined in terms of policy complexity. This distribution is then sliced by the algorithmic complexity of the policy and analysed through several diagrams and indicators. The notion of environment response curve is also introduced, by inverting the performance results into an ability scale. We apply all these concepts, diagrams and indicators to two illustrative problems: a class of agent-populated elementary cellular automata, showing how the difficulty and discriminating power may vary for several environments, and a multiagent system, where agents can become predators or preys, and may need to coordinate. Finally, we discuss how these tools can be applied to characterise (interactive) tasks and (multi-agent) environments. These characterisations can then be used to get more insight about agent performance and to facilitate the development of adaptive tests for the evaluation of agent abilities.I thank the reviewers for their comments, especially those aiming at a clearer connection with the field of multi-agent systems and the suggestion of better approximations for the calculation of the response curves. The implementation of the elementary cellular automata used in the environments is based on the library 'CellularAutomaton' by John Hughes for R [58]. I am grateful to Fernando Soler-Toscano for letting me know about their work [65] on the complexity of 2D objects generated by elementary cellular automata. I would also like to thank David L. Dowe for his comments on a previous version of this paper. This work was supported by the MEC/MINECO projects CONSOLIDER-INGENIO CSD2007-00022 and TIN 2010-21062-C02-02, GVA project PROMETEO/2008/051, the COST - European Cooperation in the field of Scientific and Technical Research IC0801 AT, and the REFRAME project, granted by the European Coordinated Research on Long-term Challenges in Information and Communication Sciences & Technologies ERA-Net (CHIST-ERA), and funded by the Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad in Spain (PCIN-2013-037).José Hernández-Orallo (2015). On environment difficulty and discriminating power. Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems. 29(3):402-454. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10458-014-9257-1S402454293Anderson, J., Baltes, J., & Cheng, C. T. (2011). Robotics competitions as benchmarks for ai research. The Knowledge Engineering Review, 26(01), 11–17.Andre, D., & Russell, S. J. (2002). State abstraction for programmable reinforcement learning agents. In Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (pp. 119–125). Menlo Park, CA; Cambridge, MA; London; AAAI Press; MIT Press; 1999.Antunes, L., Fortnow, L., van Melkebeek, D., & Vinodchandran, N. V. (2006). Computational depth: Concept and applications. Theoretical Computer Science, 354(3), 391–404. Foundations of Computation Theory (FCT 2003), 14th Symposium on Fundamentals of Computation Theory 2003.Arai, K., Kaminka, G. A., Frank, I., & Tanaka-Ishii, K. (2003). Performance competitions as research infrastructure: Large scale comparative studies of multi-agent teams. Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, 7(1–2), 121–144.Ashcraft, M. H., Donley, R. D., Halas, M. A., & Vakali, M. (1992). Chapter 8 working memory, automaticity, and problem difficulty. In Jamie I.D. Campbell (Ed.), The nature and origins of mathematical skills, volume 91 of advances in psychology (pp. 301–329). North-Holland.Ay, N., Müller, M., & Szkola, A. (2010). Effective complexity and its relation to logical depth. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 56(9), 4593–4607.Barch, D. M., Braver, T. S., Nystrom, L. E., Forman, S. D., Noll, D. C., & Cohen, J. D. (1997). Dissociating working memory from task difficulty in human prefrontal cortex. Neuropsychologia, 35(10), 1373–1380.Bordini, R. H., Hübner, J. F., & Wooldridge, M. (2007). Programming multi-agent systems in AgentSpeak using Jason. London: Wiley. com.Boutilier, C., Reiter, R., Soutchanski, M., Thrun, S. et al. (2000). Decision-theoretic, high-level agent programming in the situation calculus. In Proceedings of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (pp. 355–362). Menlo Park, CA; Cambridge, MA; London; AAAI Press; MIT Press; 1999.Busoniu, L., Babuska, R., & De Schutter, B. (2008). A comprehensive survey of multiagent reinforcement learning. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part C: Applications and Reviews, 38(2), 156–172.Chaitin, G. J. (1977). Algorithmic information theory. IBM Journal of Research and Development, 21, 350–359.Chedid, F. B. (2010). Sophistication and logical depth revisited. In 2010 IEEE/ACS International Conference on Computer Systems and Applications (AICCSA) (pp. 1–4). IEEE.Cheeseman, P., Kanefsky, B. & Taylor, W. M. (1991). Where the really hard problems are. In Proceedings of IJCAI-1991 (pp. 331–337).Dastani, M. (2008). 2APL: A practical agent programming language. Autonomous Agents and Multi-agent Systems, 16(3), 214–248.Delahaye, J. P. & Zenil, H. (2011). Numerical evaluation of algorithmic complexity for short strings: A glance into the innermost structure of randomness. Applied Mathematics and Computation, 219(1), 63–77Dowe, D. L. (2008). Foreword re C. S. Wallace. Computer Journal, 51(5), 523–560. Christopher Stewart WALLACE (1933–2004) memorial special issue.Dowe, D. L., & Hernández-Orallo, J. (2012). IQ tests are not for machines, yet. Intelligence, 40(2), 77–81.Du, D. Z., & Ko, K. I. (2011). Theory of computational complexity (Vol. 58). London: Wiley-Interscience.Elo, A. E. (1978). The rating of chessplayers, past and present (Vol. 3). London: Batsford.Embretson, S. E., & Reise, S. P. (2000). Item response theory for psychologists. London: Lawrence Erlbaum.Fatès, N. & Chevrier, V. (2010). How important are updating schemes in multi-agent systems? an illustration on a multi-turmite model. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems: volume 1-Volume 1 (pp. 533–540). International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems.Ferber, J. & Müller, J. P. (1996). Influences and reaction: A model of situated multiagent systems. In Proceedings of Second International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems (ICMAS-96) (pp. 72–79).Ferrando, P. J. (2009). Difficulty, discrimination, and information indices in the linear factor analysis model for continuous item responses. Applied Psychological Measurement, 33(1), 9–24.Ferrando, P. J. (2012). Assessing the discriminating power of item and test scores in the linear factor-analysis model. Psicológica, 33, 111–139.Gent, I. P., & Walsh, T. (1994). Easy problems are sometimes hard. Artificial Intelligence, 70(1), 335–345.Gershenson, C. & Fernandez, N. (2012). Complexity and information: Measuring emergence, self-organization, and homeostasis at multiple scales. Complexity, 18(2), 29–44.Gruner, S. (2010). Mobile agent systems and cellular automata. Autonomous Agents and Multi-agent Systems, 20(2), 198–233.Hardman, D. K., & Payne, S. J. (1995). Problem difficulty and response format in syllogistic reasoning. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 48(4), 945–975.He, J., Reeves, C., Witt, C., & Yao, X. (2007). A note on problem difficulty measures in black-box optimization: Classification, realizations and predictability. Evolutionary Computation, 15(4), 435–443.Hernández-Orallo, J. (2000). Beyond the turing test. Journal of Logic Language & Information, 9(4), 447–466.Hernández-Orallo, J. (2000). On the computational measurement of intelligence factors. In A. Meystel (Ed.), Performance metrics for intelligent systems workshop (pp. 1–8). Gaithersburg, MD: National Institute of Standards and Technology.Hernández-Orallo, J. (2000). Thesis: Computational measures of information gain and reinforcement in inference processes. AI Communications, 13(1), 49–50.Hernández-Orallo, J. (2010). A (hopefully) non-biased universal environment class for measuring intelligence of biological and artificial systems. In M. Hutter et al. (Ed.), 3rd International Conference on Artificial General Intelligence (pp. 182–183). Atlantis Press Extended report at http://users.dsic.upv.es/proy/anynt/unbiased.pdf .Hernández-Orallo, J., & Dowe, D. L. (2010). Measuring universal intelligence: Towards an anytime intelligence test. Artificial Intelligence, 174(18), 1508–1539.Hernández-Orallo, J., Dowe, D. L., España-Cubillo, S., Hernández-Lloreda, M. V., & Insa-Cabrera, J. (2011). On more realistic environment distributions for defining, evaluating and developing intelligence. In J. Schmidhuber, K. R. Thórisson, & M. Looks (Eds.), LNAI series on artificial general intelligence 2011 (Vol. 6830, pp. 82–91). Berlin: Springer.Hernández-Orallo, J., Dowe, D. L., & Hernández-Lloreda, M. V. (2014). Universal psychometrics: Measuring cognitive abilities in the machine kingdom. Cognitive Systems Research, 27, 50–74.Hernández-Orallo, J., Insa, J., Dowe, D. L. & Hibbard, B. (2012). Turing tests with turing machines. In A. Voronkov (Ed.), The Alan Turing Centenary Conference, Turing-100, Manchester, 2012, volume 10 of EPiC Series (pp. 140–156).Hernández-Orallo, J. & Minaya-Collado, N. (1998). A formal definition of intelligence based on an intensional variant of Kolmogorov complexity. In Proceedings of International Symposium of Engineering of Intelligent Systems (EIS’98) (pp. 146–163). ICSC Press.Hibbard, B. (2009). Bias and no free lunch in formal measures of intelligence. Journal of Artificial General Intelligence, 1(1), 54–61.Hoos, H. H. (1999). Sat-encodings, search space structure, and local search performance. In 1999 International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (Vol. 16, pp. 296–303).Insa-Cabrera, J., Benacloch-Ayuso, J. L., & Hernández-Orallo, J. (2012). On measuring social intelligence: Experiments on competition and cooperation. In J. Bach, B. Goertzel, & M. Iklé (Eds.), AGI, volume 7716 of lecture notes in computer science (pp. 126–135). Berlin: Springer.Insa-Cabrera, J., Dowe, D. L., España-Cubillo, S., Hernández-Lloreda, M. V., & Hernández-Orallo, J. (2011). Comparing humans and AI agents. In J. Schmidhuber, K. R. Thórisson, & M. Looks (Eds.), LNAI series on artificial general intelligence 2011 (Vol. 6830, pp. 122–132). Berlin: Springer.Knuth, D. E. (1973). Sorting and searching, volume 3 of the art of computer programming. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.Kotovsky, K., & Simon, H. A. (1990). What makes some problems really hard: Explorations in the problem space of difficulty. Cognitive Psychology, 22(2), 143–183.Legg, S. (2008). Machine super intelligence. PhD thesis, Department of Informatics, University of Lugano, June 2008.Legg, S., & Hutter, M. (2007). Universal intelligence: A definition of machine intelligence. Minds and Machines, 17(4), 391–444.Leonetti, M. & Iocchi, L. (2010). Improving the performance of complex agent plans through reinforcement learning. In Proceedings of the 2010 International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (Vol. 1, pp. 723–730). International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems.Levin, L. A. (1973). Universal sequential search problems. Problems of Information Transmission, 9(3), 265–266.Levin, L. A. (1986). Average case complete problems. SIAM Journal on Computing, 15, 285.Li, M., & Vitányi, P. (2008). An introduction to Kolmogorov complexity and its applications (3rd ed.). Berlin: Springer.Low, C. K., Chen, T. Y., & Rónnquist, R. (1999). Automated test case generation for bdi agents. Autonomous Agents and Multi-agent Systems, 2(4), 311–332.Madden, M. G., & Howley, T. (2004). Transfer of experience between reinforcement learning environments with progressive difficulty. Artificial Intelligence Review, 21(3), 375–398.Mellenbergh, G. J. (1994). Generalized linear item response theory. Psychological Bulletin, 115(2), 300.Michel, F. (2004). Formalisme, outils et éléments méthodologiques pour la modélisation et la simulation multi-agents. PhD thesis, Université des sciences et techniques du Languedoc, Montpellier.Miller, G. A. (1956). The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychological Review, 63(2), 81.Orponen, P., Ko, K. I., Schöning, U., & Watanabe, O. (1994). Instance complexity. Journal of the ACM (JACM), 41(1), 96–121.Simon, H. A., & Kotovsky, K. (1963). Human acquisition of concepts for sequential patterns. Psychological Review, 70(6), 534.Team, R., et al. (2013). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. Vienna, Austria: R Foundation for Statistical Computing.Whiteson, S., Tanner, B., & White, A. (2010). The reinforcement learning competitions. The AI Magazine, 31(2), 81–94.Wiering, M., & van Otterlo, M. (Eds.). (2012). Reinforcement learning: State-of-the-art. Berlin: Springer.Wolfram, S. (2002). A new kind of science. Champaign, IL: Wolfram Media.Zatuchna, Z., & Bagnall, A. (2009). Learning mazes with aliasing states: An LCS algorithm with associative perception. Adaptive Behavior, 17(1), 28–57.Zenil, H. (2010). Compression-based investigation of the dynamical properties of cellular automata and other systems. Complex Systems, 19(1), 1–28.Zenil, H. (2011). Une approche expérimentale à la théorie algorithmique de la complexité. PhD thesis, Dissertation in fulfilment of the degree of Doctor in Computer Science, Université de Lille.Zenil, H., Soler-Toscano, F., Delahaye, J. P. & Gauvrit, N. (2012). Two-dimensional kolmogorov complexity and validation of the coding theorem method by compressibility. arXiv, preprint arXiv:1212.6745

Community assessment to advance computational prediction of cancer drug combinations in a pharmacogenomic screen

The effectiveness of most cancer targeted therapies is short-lived. Tumors often develop resistance that might be overcome with drug combinations. However, the number of possible combinations is vast, necessitating data-driven approaches to find optimal patient-specific treatments. Here we report AstraZeneca’s large drug combination dataset, consisting of 11,576 experiments from 910 combinations across 85 molecularly characterized cancer cell lines, and results of a DREAM Challenge to evaluate computational strategies for predicting synergistic drug pairs and biomarkers. 160 teams participated to provide a comprehensive methodological development and benchmarking. Winning methods incorporate prior knowledge of drug-target interactions. Synergy is predicted with an accuracy matching biological replicates for >60% of combinations. However, 20% of drug combinations are poorly predicted by all methods. Genomic rationale for synergy predictions are identified, including ADAM17 inhibitor antagonism when combined with PIK3CB/D inhibition contrasting to synergy when combined with other PI3K-pathway inhibitors in PIK3CA mutant cells.Peer reviewe

Inferring causal molecular networks: empirical assessment through a community-based effort

Inferring molecular networks is a central challenge in computational biology. However, it has remained unclear whether causal, rather than merely correlational, relationships can be effectively inferred in complex biological settings. Here we describe the HPN-DREAM network inference challenge that focused on learning causal influences in signaling networks. We used phosphoprotein data from cancer cell lines as well as in silico data from a nonlinear dynamical model. Using the phosphoprotein data, we scored more than 2,000 networks submitted by challenge participants. The networks spanned 32 biological contexts and were scored in terms of causal validity with respect to unseen interventional data. A number of approaches were effective and incorporating known biology was generally advantageous. Additional sub-challenges considered time-course prediction and visualization. Our results constitute the most comprehensive assessment of causal network inference in a mammalian setting carried out to date and suggest that learning causal relationships may be feasible in complex settings such as disease states. Furthermore, our scoring approach provides a practical way to empirically assess the causal validity of inferred molecular networks

Inferring causal molecular networks: empirical assessment through a community-based effort

It remains unclear whether causal, rather than merely correlational, relationships in molecular networks can be inferred in complex biological settings. Here we describe the HPN-DREAM network inference challenge, which focused on learning causal influences in signaling networks. We used phosphoprotein data from cancer cell lines as well as in silico data from a nonlinear dynamical model. Using the phosphoprotein data, we scored more than 2,000 networks submitted by challenge participants. The networks spanned 32 biological contexts and were scored in terms of causal validity with respect to unseen interventional data. A number of approaches were effective, and incorporating known biology was generally advantageous. Additional sub-challenges considered time-course prediction and visualization. Our results suggest that learning causal relationships may be feasible in complex settings such as disease states. Furthermore, our scoring approach provides a practical way to empirically assess inferred molecular networks in a causal sense