Although many investigators affirm a desire to build reasoning systems that behave consistently with the axiomatic basis defined by probability theory and utility theory, limited resources for engineering and computation can make a complete normative analysis impossible. We attempt to move discussion beyond the debate…
This is a "popular" account of the transition-axiom method that I introduced in [50]. To make the ideas more accessible, I wrote it in a question-answer style that I copied from the dialogues of Galileo. The writing in this paper may be the best I've…
Reversed field pinches are conventionally stabilised by surrounding the plasma with a thick metallic shell. This suppresses flux penetration but only for times shorter than the shell's resistive diffusion time. To improve on this we propose replacing the thick shell with an intelligent shell which…
Buchi's approach to the determinacy of infinite games was original and not without a controversy. He resented determinacy proofs that did not live up to his standards of constructivity. We describe the infinite games in question, discuss the constructivity of determinacy proofs and comment on…
We construct the phase diagram of any system which admits a low-temperature polymer or cluster expansion. Such an expansion turns the system into a hard-core interacting contour model with small, but not necessarily positive, activities. The method uses some of Zahradnik’s ideas [Z1], but applies…
Graphical interfaces typically provide their users with little idea of a session's history, except insofar as it is reflected in the current state of the sytem. If undo and redo commands are provided, they are often the only way to review the actions performed, cycling…
You want your own processors and memory because 1) you want administrative control over its scheduling policy and 2) having your own makes it potentially more private. Having administrative control means you can optimize for low latency rather than high throughput and that you can…
Why build a distributed system? Why not spend the same money and effort on a centralized system? There are several attractions to sticking with a centralized system. a) It's easier to build. It doesn't need much research to build powerful centralized systems. The technologies are…
Secret Sharing from the perspective of threshold schemes has been well-studied over the past decade. Threshold schemes, however, can only handle a small fraction of the secret sharing functions which we may wish to form For example, if it is desirable to divide a secret…
In 1983, Gallager, Humblet, and Spira published a distributed algorithm for computing a minimum spanning tree. For several years, I regarded it as a benchmark problem for verifying concurrent algorithms. A couple of times, I attempted to write an invariance proof, but the invariant became…
In this paper, an empirical evaluation of three inference methods for uncertain reasoning is presented in the context of Pathfinder, a large expert system for the diagnosis of lymph-node pathology. The inference procedures evaluated are (1) Bayes' theorem, assuming evidence is conditionally independent given each…
This is a more traditional response to Dijkstra's EWD 1013 (see [79]). We point out that Dijkstra's same argument can be applied to show that termination is a meaningless requirement because it can't be refuted by looking at a program for a finite length of…
