Adversary Method Research Articles

Competition in philosophy is a feminist issue

The role of competition in philosophy is not just a pedagogical concern, but also a feminist concern. Competitive philosophy in schools is intrinsically linked to Janice Moulton’s feminist critique of academic philosophy referred to as ‘The Adversary Method’. She argues that dialogue that emphasises adversarial methods of argumentation promote dominant notions of masculinity. Many philosophers and educators argue that this traditional ideal of masculinity and the adversarial mode of communicating are problematic for a variety of reasons. There has also been a broad array of empirical research demonstrating gender differences in classroom dialogue, including girls feeling targeted by teachers and boys due to the culture established with competitive-type dialogues. There is a direct link between this research and the espousal of masculine Reason in education. More, this kind of Reason is one that is overemphasised in competitive dialogues, such as debates or competitive philosophy. There are three primary concerns for competitive philosophy. Firstly, that it disadvantages girls in particular by over-emphasising masculine attributes. Secondly, that it disadvantages all students, regardless of sex, by over-emphasising masculine attributes. And thirdly, that it undermines the values of the Philosophy for/with Children and the Community of Inquiry approach by, again, over-emphasising masculine attributes. Therefore, the concern for competition in philosophy is not just about pedagogy, it is about justice.

A tight lower bound for non-coherent index erasure

The index erasure problem is a quantum state generation problem that asks a quantum computer to prepare a uniform superposition over the image of an injective function given by an oracle. We prove a tight $\Omega(\sqrt{n})$ lower bound on the quantum query complexity of the non-coherent case of the problem, where, in addition to preparing the required superposition, the algorithm is allowed to leave the ancillary memory in an arbitrary function-dependent state. This resolves an open question of Ambainis et al., who gave a tight bound for the coherent case, the case where the ancillary memory must return to its initial state. To prove our main result, we first extend the automorphism principle}of Hoyer et al. to the general adversary method of Lee et al. for state generation problems, which allows one to exploit the symmetries of these problems to lower bound their quantum query complexity. Using this method, we establish a strong connection between the quantum query complexity of non-coherent symmetric state generation problems and the Krein parameters of an association scheme defined on injective functions. In particular, we use the spherical harmonics a finite symmetric Gelfand pair associated with the space of injective functions to obtain asymptotic bounds on certain Krein parameters, from which the main result follows.

Correlation based malicious traffic analysis system

Artificial intelligence methods have often been applied to carry out specific functions or errands in the cyber-defense realm. However, as adversary methods become more complex and difficult to divine, piecemeal efforts to understand cyber-attacks, and malware-based attacks in particular, are not providing sufficient means for malware analysts to understand the past, present and future distinctiveness of malware. Because, most of the malware communications take place-utilizing services. These services are completely anonymous and monitoring such services is a hard task. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel traffic analysis scheme using correlation methods (non-parametric approach). Experiments are performed to validate the proposed approach on the real time traffic data collected over the period of 1 week. The experimental results confirm that the proposed method outperforms the existing state of the art traffic analysis schemes. The result also exhibits the traffic classification performance, which is analyzed by the decade old nearest neighbor method.

All Classical Adversary Methods Are Equivalent for Total Functions

We show that all known classical adversary lower bounds on randomized query complexity are equivalent for total functions and are equal to the fractional block sensitivity fbs( f ). That includes the Kolmogorov complexity bound of Laplante and Magniez and the earlier relational adversary bound of Aaronson. This equivalence also implies that for total functions, the relational adversary is equivalent to a simpler lower bound, which we call rank-1 relational adversary. For partial functions, we show unbounded separations between fbs( f ) and other adversary bounds, as well as between the adversary bounds themselves. We also show that, for partial functions, fractional block sensitivity cannot give lower bounds larger than √ n ⋅ bs( f ), where n is the number of variables and bs( f ) is the block sensitivity. Then, we exhibit a partial function f that matches this upper bound, fbs( f ) = Ω (√ n ⋅ bs( f )).

Ten years of hardware Trojans: a survey from the attacker's perspective

Hardware Trojan detection techniques have been studied extensively. However, to develop reliable and effective defenses, it is important to figure out how hardware Trojans are implemented in practical scenarios. The authors attempt to make a review of the hardware Trojan design and implementations in the last decade and also provide an outlook. Unlike all previous surveys that discuss Trojans from the defender's perspective, for the first time, the authors study the Trojans from the attacker's perspective, focusing on the attacker's methods, capabilities, and challenges when the attacker designs and implements a hardware Trojan. First, the authors present adversarial models in terms of the adversary's methods, adversary's capabilities, and adversary's challenges in seven practical hardware Trojan implementation scenarios: in-house design team attacks, third-party intellectual property vendor attacks, computer-aided design tools attacks, fabrication stage attacks, testing stage attacks, distribution stage attacks, and field-programmable gate array Trojan attacks. Second, the authors analyse the hardware Trojan implementation methods under each adversarial model in terms of seven aspects/metrics: hardware Trojan attack scenarios, the attacker's motivation, feasibility, detectability (anti-detection capability), protection and prevention suggestions for the designer, overhead analysis, and case studies of Trojan implementations. Finally, future directions on hardware Trojan attacks and defenses are also discussed.

Argumentation, Adversariality, and Social Norms

AbstractJanice Moulton's “The Adversary Method: A Philosophical Paradigm” articulated several criticisms of the popular idea of philosophy as adversarial debate. Moulton criticizes it on epistemic grounds, arguing that philosophy's overreliance on adversarial debate is to the detriment of its goals. Some, notably Trudy Govier, have argued in favor of at least a minimal adversariality, governed by norms of respectful argumentation. This paper suggests that Govier's faith in these norms is misplaced, because it neglects the social circumstances of the arguers. While some authors have argued that politeness and aggression apply differently to those of different genders, this paper extends that analysis to social identities other than gender. In fact, given certain assumptions about the philosophy of language, engagement in polite adversarial debate may not even be possible for people occupying certain social locations.

On the Optimality of Tape Merge of Two Lists with Similar Size

The problem of merging sorted lists in the least number of pairwise comparisons has been solved completely only for a few special cases. Graham and Karp (Sorting Search 3:197–207, 1999) independently discovered that the tape merge algorithm is optimal in the worst case when the two lists have the same size. In their seminal papers, Stockmeyer and Yao (SIAM J Comput 9(1):85–90, 1980), Murphy and Paull (Inf Control 42(1):87–96, 1979), and Christen (On the optimality of the straight merging algorithm, 1978) independently showed when the lists to be merged are of size m and n satisfying $$m\le n\le \lfloor \frac{3}{2}m\rfloor +1$$, the tape merge algorithm is optimal in the worst case. This paper extends this result by showing that the tape merge algorithm is optimal in the worst case whenever the size of one list is no larger than 1.52 times the size of the other. The main tool we use to prove the lower bound is Knuth’s (1999) adversary methods. In addition, we show that the lower bound cannot be improved to 1.8 via Knuth’s adversary methods. Moreover, we design a simple procedure, and by invoking this procedure recursively until the remaining subproblem can be solved efficiently by another known algorithm, we achieve constant improvement of the upper bound for $$2m-2\le n\le 3m $$.

Philosophy for Everyone

The lack of diversity in academic philosophy has been well documented. This paper examines the reasons for this issue, identifying two intertwining norms within philosophy which contribute to it: the assertion that the Adversary Method is the primary mode of argumentation and the excessive boundary policing surrounding what constitutes “real” philosophy. These norms reinforce each other, creating a space where diverse practitioners must defend their work as philosophy before it can be engaged with philosophically. Therefore, if we are to address the diversity issue, these norms must change. I advocate for the community of philosophical inquiry to serve as a new standard of practice, as it requires a simultaneous reimagining of both norms, thereby addressing the issues that arise from the two elements working in tandem. With its emphasis on epistemic openness and constructive collaboration, and a broader definition of philosophy which conceptualizes it as a method of questioning/analyzing rather than a particular subject matter, I posit that its implementation would facilitate a more welcoming climate for diverse practitioners. While these changes are unlikely to solve the diversity problem “once and for all,” I argue that they would significantly help to improve it.

Alternatives to Traditional Adversary Methods of Presenting Scientific Expertise in the Legal System

The twin goals of any litigation are to arrive at a correct outcome and provide the parties with a sense that they were treated justly, even if they do not prevail. Adversarial proceedings are often perceived to be superior to inquisitorial proceedings with respect to the second goal but inferior with respect to the first. This is especially the case when proceedings involve expert testimony. In this essay, we discuss several relatively minor changes to typical adversarial processes that offer the potential of improving trial accuracy without disrupting the overall structure of adversarial proceedings. These changes include 1) alterations to the organization of the trial, including concurrent expert testimony; 2) alterations to the role of the jury, including taking notes, asking questions, and receiving written expert reports; and 3) formal expert witness codes of conduct designed to better arm experts to resist the adversarial pressures that lead to biased testimony.

Adversary lower bounds for the collision and the set equality problems

We prove tight \Omega(n^{1/3}) lower bounds on the quantum query complexity of the Collision and the Set Equality problems, provided that the size of the alphabet is large enough. We do this using the negative-weight adversary method. Thus, we reprove the result by Aaronson and Shi, as well as a more recent development by Zhandry.

In Peace Prepared: Innovation and Adaptation in Canada's Cold War Army by Andrew B. Godefroy

In Peace Prepared: Innovation and Adaptation in Canada's Cold War Army, by Andrew B. Godefroy. Vancouver, University of British Columbia Press, 2014. 292 pp. $95.00 Cdn (cloth), $32.95 Cdn (paper). Doctrine within a military context relates to what is taught in terms of strategy, tactics, and operations. It impacts how an army is organized, moves, sustains itself, and solves particular battlefield problems like how to attack or defend a particular type of terrain. The standard interpretation held by Canadian military historians, who have written about Canada's army during the Cold War era, is that it lacked an institutional approach to conceiving, designing, and building modern land forces and therefore was not capable of the innovation and adaptation required to develop its own doctrine. The author of In Peace Prepared: Innovation and Adaptation in Canada's Cold War Army, Andrew Godefroy, counters that image, arguing that the evidence available shows there was organized conceptual and doctrinal development, which as much as political and operational influences shaped the army during this era. In the first chapter of In Peace Prepared, Godefroy demonstrates the existence of Canadian strategic thought and military intellectual debate from confederation to the end of World War II. The following five chapters detail the various organizations within the Canadian Army that were responsible for innovation, adaptation, and transformation of doctrine up to unification in 1968. Throughout, the subject of Canadian military innovation and adaptation is placed within the context of domestic and international political developments, budgetary concerns, changing technology, military operations, and the evolving strategic environment. We are also introduced to the biases and prejudices of the personalities who coloured the public and institutional discourse on army doctrine. Emerging from World War II, the Canadian Army was a large, highly professional force, which had to adapt to budget cuts and downsizing as part of the peace dividend. The perceived security threat posed by the Soviet Union meant the army prepared for the defence of the Canadian North and Western Europe primarily. This was done within the context of collective security and multilateral alliances with traditional allies like the United States, Great Britain, and Australia in the American, British, Canadian, and Australian (ABCA) armies association and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Of necessity the Canadian Army needed to be interoperable with these allies in both equipment and doctrine. Consequently the agencies responsible for developing Canadian doctrine studied the potential adversary's methods, especially Soviet winter operations, such as the campaigns against Finland from 1939 to 1944. …

The doctrine of party autonomy in international commercial arbitration: myth or reality?

The increased preference for arbitration has buttressed the growing disenchantment for traditional adversary method of litigation. The foundation of every arbitration proceeding is the arbitration agreement. The parties’ agreement constitutes a contract to refer disputes, which have arisen or may arise in future between them to arbitration. The freedom of parties to consensually execute arbitration agreement is known as the principle of party autonomy. The principle provides a right for the parties to international commercial arbitration to choose applicable substantive law and these laws when chosen shall govern the contractual relationship of the parties. However, the pertinent questions have always been: Do parties actually have absolute freedom to determine the arbitration process? To what extent has this been achieved in the resolution of disputes having international concerns? And lastly, is party autonomy a myth or reality? These questions and many others have continued to provoke discussions in many fora on the applicability of party autonomy in international commercial arbitration. To find meaning to the above questions, this article analyses the principle of party autonomy. The ultimate aim of the article is to answer the question whether the practical application of the principle of party autonomy is indeed a myth or reality?Keywords: Party Autonomy, International Commercial Arbitration.

Explicit relation between all lower bound techniques for quantum query complexity

The polynomial method and the adversary method are the two main techniques to prove lower bounds on quantum query complexity, and they have so far been considered as unrelated approaches. Here, we show an explicit reduction from the polynomial method to the multiplicative adversary method. The proof goes by extending the polynomial method from Boolean functions to quantum state generation problems. In the process, the bound is even strengthened. We then show that this extended polynomial method is a special case of the multiplicative adversary method with an adversary matrix that is independent of the function. This new result therefore provides insight on the reason why in some cases the adversary method is stronger than the polynomial method. It also reveals a clear picture of the relation between the different lower bound techniques, as it implies that all known techniques reduce to the multiplicative adversary method.

A strong direct product theorem for quantum query complexity

We show that quantum query complexity satisfies a strong direct product theorem. This means that computing k copies of a function with fewer than k times the quantum queries needed to compute one copy of the function implies that the overall success probability will be exponentially small in k. For a boolean function f, we also show an XOR lemma—computing the parity of k copies of f with fewer than k times the queries needed for one copy implies that the advantage over random guessing will be exponentially small. We do this by showing that the multiplicative adversary method, which inherently satisfies a strong direct product theorem, characterizes bounded-error quantum query complexity. In particular, we show that the multiplicative adversary bound is always at least as large as the additive adversary bound, which is known to characterize bounded-error quantum query complexity.

Quantum Money from Hidden Subspaces

Forty years ago, Wiesner pointed out that quantum mechanics raises the striking possibility of money that cannot be counterfeited according to the laws of physics. We propose the first quantum money scheme that is (1) public-key, meaning that anyone can verify a banknote as genuine, not only the bank that printed it, and (2) cryptographically secure, under a hardness assumption that has nothing to do with quantum money. Our scheme is based on hidden subspaces, encoded as the zero-sets of random multivariate polynomials. A main technical advance is to show that the black-box version of our scheme, where the polynomials are replaced by classical oracles, is unconditionally secure. Previously, such a result had only been known relative to a quantum oracle (and even there, the proof was never published). Even in Wiesner's original setting -- quantum money that can only be verified by the bank -- we are able to use our techniques to patch a major security hole in Wiesner's scheme. We give the first private-key quantum money scheme that allows unlimited verifications and that remains unconditionally secure, even if the counterfeiter can interact adaptively with the bank. Our money scheme is simpler than previous public-key quantum money schemes, including a knot-based scheme of Farhi et al. The verifier needs to perform only two tests, one in the standard basis and one in the Hadamard basis -- matching the original intuition for quantum money, based on the existence of complementary observables. Our security proofs use a new variant of Ambainis's quantum adversary method, and several other tools that might be of independent interest.

A Comparative Analysis of PRA and Intelligent Adversary Methods for Counterterrorism Risk Management

In counterterrorism risk management decisions, the analyst can choose to represent terrorist decisions as defender uncertainties or as attacker decisions. We perform a comparative analysis of probabilistic risk analysis (PRA) methods including event trees, influence diagrams, Bayesian networks, decision trees, game theory, and combined methods on the same illustrative examples (container screening for radiological materials) to get insights into the significant differences in assumptions and results. A key tenent of PRA and decision analysis is the use of subjective probability to assess the likelihood of possible outcomes. For each technique, we compare the assumptions, probability assessment requirements, risk levels, and potential insights for risk managers. We find that assessing the distribution of potential attacker decisions is a complex judgment task, particularly considering the adaptation of the attacker to defender decisions. Intelligent adversary risk analysis and adversarial risk analysis are extensions of decision analysis and sequential game theory that help to decompose such judgments. These techniques explicitly show the adaptation of the attacker and the resulting shift in risk based on defender decisions.

The Authority of the Fallacies Approach to Argument Evaluation

Popular textbook treatments of the fallacies approach to argument evaluation employ the Adversary Method identified by Janice Moulton (1983) that takes the goal of argumentation to be the defeat of other arguments and that narrows the terms of discourse in order to facilitate such defeat. My analysis of the textbooks shows that the Adversary Method operates as a Kuhnian paradigm in philosophy, and demonstrates that the popular fallacies pedagogy is authoritarian in being unresponsive to the scholarly developments in informal logic and argumentation theory. A progressive evolution for the fallacies approach is offered as an authoritative alternative.

The quantum query complexity of certification

We study the quantum query complexity of finding a certificate for a d-regular, k-level balanced \nand formula. We show that the query complexity is $\tilde\Theta(d^{(k+1)/2})$ for 0-certificates, and $\tilde\Theta(d^{k/2})$ for 1-certificates. In particular, this shows that the zero-error quantum query complexity of evaluating such formulas is $\tilde O(d^{(k+1)/2})$. Our lower bound relies on the fact that the quantum adversary method obeys a direct sum theorem.

A New Quantum Lower Bound Method, with an Application to a Strong Direct Product Theorem for Quantum Search

We present a new method for proving lower bounds on quantum query al- gorithms. The new method is an extension of the adversary method, by analyzing the eigenspace structure of the problem. Using the new method, we prove a strong direct product theorem for quantum search. This result was previously proved by Klauck, ˇ Spalek, and de Wolf (FOCS'04) using the polynomials method. No proof using the adversary method was known before.

Adversary lower bounds for nonadaptive quantum algorithms

We present two general methods for proving lower bounds on the query complexity of nonadaptive quantum algorithms. Both methods are based on the adversary method of Ambainis. We show that they yield optimal lower bounds for several natural problems, and we challenge the reader to determine the nonadaptive quantum query complexity of the “1-to-1 versus 2-to-1” problem and of Hidden Translation. In addition to the results presented at Wollic 2008 in the conference version of this paper, we show that the lower bound given by the second method is always at least as good (and sometimes better) as the lower bound given by the first method. We also compare these two quantum lower bounds to probabilistic lower bounds.