Rational Decision-Making in Business Organizations

Lecture to the memory of Alfred Nobel, December 8, 1978decision making;

Experimentation in machine discovery

KEKADA, a system that is capable of carrying out a complex series of experiments on problems from the history of science, is described. The system incorporates a set of experimentation strategies that were extracted from the traces of the scientists' behavior. It focuses on surprises to constrain its search, and uses its strategies to generate hypotheses and to carry out experiments. Some strategies are domain independent, whereas others incorporate knowledge of a specific domain. The domain independent strategies include magnification, determining scope, divide and conquer, factor analysis, and relating different anomalous phenomena. KEKADA represents an experiment as a set of independent and dependent entities, with apparatus variables and a goal. It represents a theory either as a sequence of processes or as abstract hypotheses. KEKADA's response is described to a particular problem in biochemistry. On this and other problems, the system is capable of carrying out a complex series of experiments to refine domain theories. Analysis of the system and its behavior on a number of different problems has established its generality, but it has also revealed the reasons why the system would not be a good experimental scientist

The Creation and Detection of Arbitrary Photon Number States Using Cavity QED

No description supplie

On the Behavioral and Rational Foundation of Economic Theory

Existing uncertainties about the correct explanations for economic growth and business cycles cannot be settled by aggregative analysis within the neoclassical framework. Current disputes in theory rest largely on ad hoc, casually empirical, assumptions about departures from perfect rationality under uncertainty. Such disputes can only be settled by painstaking microeconomic empirical study of human decision making and problem solving. Microeconomic research of the kinds that are required can receive powerful guidance from the theories of human thinking that have been developed and tested over the past twenty five years by cognitive psychologists

The Structure of Ill Structured Problems

The boundary between well structured and ill structured ~roblems is vague, fluid and not susceptible to formalization. Any problem solving process w'iii appear ill structured if the problem solver is a serial machine that has access to a ~w:-yiarge long-term memory of potentially relevant information, and]or access to a very large exterlm! memory that provides information about the actual real-world c~,sequences of problem-~olving actions. There is no reason to suppose that new and hitherto uaknown concepts or teckniques are needed to enable artificial intelligence systems to operate successfully in domains that have these characteristics

Seeking the image-maker : an evaluation of Plato's account of negation and falsity in the Sophist : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Philosophy at Massey University, Manawatu, New Zealand

This paper will explore Plato’s metaphysical account of negation and falsity as outlined in Sophist, and evaluate some scholarly responses to it. It attempts to determine how the Forms interact when we say that something is not, or say something that is false. In order to achieve this we begin by examining the notion of a Kind (genos) that Plato seems to introduce in Sophist. This term is widely assumed to be synonymous with Form (eidos); we shall argue that the evidence does not support this, on the grounds that Plato seems to be using Kinds in a new way in Sophist, even though he has used the word genos before. Second, we consider the question of how a Form or a Kind may be said to have parts, and finally we evaluate some scholarly interpretations of negation and falsity, both on their own merits and in light of what we believe Plato’s purpose in seeking an account of negation and falsity has been. We propose some changes to an existing interpretation in order to make it fit more closely the results of our analysis of Kinds and the parts of Forms and so to more closely suit Plato’s requirements

Reply to “final note” by Benoit Mandelbrot

Dr. Mandelbrot's original objections (1959) to using the Yule process to explain the phenomena of word frequencies were refuted in Simon (1960), and are now mostly abandoned. The present “Reply” refutes the almost entirely new arguments introduced by Dr. Mandelbrot in his “Final Note,” and demonstrates again the adequacy of the models in 1955