chaosPanda's library 7 articles

Abstract

Cognition is thinking; it feels like something to think, and only those who can feel can think. There are also things that thinkers can do. We know neither how thinkers can think nor how they are able to do what they can do. We are waiting for cognitive science to discover how. Cognitive science does this by testing hypotheses about what processes can generate what doing (“know-how”).This is called the Turing Test. It cannot test whether a process can generate feeling, ...

Abstract

This paper places models of language evolution within the framework of information theory. We study how signals become associated with meaning. If there is a probability of mistaking signals for each other, then evolution leads to an error limit: increasing the number of signals does not increase the fitness of a language beyond a certain limit. This error limit can be overcome by word formation: a linear increase of the word length leads to an exponential increase of the maximum fitness. ...

Abstract

In a recent article Mitchener and Nowak present a model of the evolutionary dynamics of language. The model exhibits regular and chaotic oscillations in changes to the proportions of grammars spoken in a population over the course of evolution. These oscillations are within the purview of evolutionary game theory, but they suggest the lack of an evolutionarily stable strategy. Implications for self-organization across scales of adaptation are discussed. ...

Abstract

Complex networks have been studied extensively due to their relevance to many real systems as diverse as the World-Wide-Web (WWW), the Internet, energy landscapes, biological and social networks \citeab-review,mendes,vespignani,newman,amaral. A large number of real networks are called “scale-free” because they show a power-law distribution of the number of links per node \citeab-review,barabasi1999,faloutsos. However, it is widely believed that complex networks are not length-scale invariant or self-similar. This conclusion originates from the “small-world” property of these networks, which implies that the number of nodes increases exponentially with the “diameter” of ...

Abstract

A number of solutions have been proposed to address the free-riding problem in peer-to-peer file sharing systems. The solutions are either imperfect-they allow some users to cheat the system with malicious behavior, or expensive-they require human intervention, require servers, or incur high mental transaction costs. The authors proposed a method to address these weaknesses. Specifically, a utility function was introduced to capture contributions made by a user and an auditing scheme to ensure the integrity of a utility function's values. The ...

Abstract

Systems composed of interacting autonomous agents offer a promising software engineering approach for developing applications in complex domains. However, this multiagent system paradigm introduces a number of new abstractions and design/development issues when compared with more traditional approaches to software development. Accordingly, new analysis and design methodologies, as well as new tools, are needed to effectively engineer such systems. Against this background, the contribution of this article is twofold. First, we synthesize and clarify the key abstractions of agent-based ...