Independent Rules Research Articles

When is a choice not a choice? Pigeons fail to inhibit incorrect responses on a go/no-go midsession reversal task.

In a 2-stimulus visual discrimination choice task with a reversal in reward contingencies midway through each session, pigeons produce a surprising number of both anticipatory errors (i.e., responding to the second-correct stimulus before the reversal) and perseverative errors (i.e., responding to the first-correct stimulus after the reversal). Here, we used a go/no-go version of the task to examine the degree to which these errors can be attributed to failure to inhibit incorrect responses near the reversal. We presented pigeons with either a green or red stimulus (randomized across trials), with pecks to 1 reinforced with food and pecks to the other stimulus leading to a 10-s time-out; the reward versus time-out contingencies reversed after 40 trials. Pigeons rarely withheld responses when reward was provided for pecking, but produced many incorrect pecks near the reversal. Subsequent experiments examined these errors with longer sessions and multiple reversals, as well as on choice tasks. Our results suggest that pigeons' errors may be due to an inability to inhibit incorrect responses rather than a deliberate choice of the incorrect stimulus on simultaneous discrimination midsession reversal procedures. Results suggest that pigeons learned independent rules about the 2 stimuli, and that training with multiple reversals changed the rules that governed pigeons' responding. (PsycINFO Database Record

Task Scheduling Model Based on Multi-Agent and Multi-Objective Dynamical Scheduling Algorithm

With the increasing number of nodes in distributed systems, the complexity of task scheduling also increases. Therefore, how to schedule tasks reasonably is becoming more and more significant. Most traditional algorithms only consider a single condition without thinking over dynamic characteristic of system and tasks and lack of comprehensive measures. Therefore they cannot meet the needs of distributed systems. To solve these problems, we establish a distributed task scheduling model based on multi-agent in this paper, build a negotiation scheduling mechanism based on the model and propose distributed multi-objective dynamical scheduling algorithm (DMOD). In the algorithm, each node is capable of independent decision-making and dynamical evaluation rules make a comprehensive evaluation of task completion time, system load and communication traffic. DMOD, MinMin and the algorithm based on tree structure (BTS) are compared through simulation experiments. Experimental results show that DMOD reduces communication traffic without increasing task completion time, avoids performance degradation caused by sharp increase of system load and communication traffic in distributed system and therefore improves system stability and task execution efficiency.

Study on Distributed Intelligent Control Model of the Ships Pipe Network

A MAS-based distributed intelligent pipeline leakage control model, ship pipe network through the intelligent valve control system for automatic, independent isolate damaged sections, thereby enhancing ship in wartime circumstances viability. According to distributed intelligent control pipe network model composed of properties, the Agent is divided into sensor Agent, processors and actuators Agent. Agent of the processor by the sensor data collected Agent independent judgment pipe segment status judgment method and control rules proposed intelligent valve leakage indicator to determine the logic of the other characteristic parameters for a comparative study. Pipeline leakage numerical simulation results show that: the model and control logic to isolate leakage pipe sections, using the model can improve the vitality of ship pipe network.

La responsabilité des fabricants de dispositifs médicaux utilisés ou fournis à l’hôpital

Who — hospital or manufacturer? — is liable to compensate no-fault damage caused by defect in a medical device used in a hospital, or supplied by it to a patient? Rulings handed down over almost six years by the Conseil d’État (Council of State) and by the Administrative Courts of Appeal of Bordeaux and Nancy initially upheld the liability of the hospitals as “users” or “or suppliers” of medical devices where they were defective. The Lyon Administrative Court of Appeal then opposed this reasoning, applying EEC directive 85/371 of 25 July 1985 relating to defective products. In this context of contradictory case-law, the Conseil d’État, to which the issue was referred, made a referral to the ECJ (European Court of Justice) on 4th October 2010, posing a double preliminary question as to whether the 1985 directive authorises specific independent rules regarding user liability for a defective product. The main issue rests in the difficulty of distinguishing between: the defective product rules arising from EEC directive 85/371; the judicial rules on no-fault liability of public health institutions as established by the Marzouk ruling (EC, 9th July 2003), and Article L. 1142-1-I of the Public Health Code, which poses, in principle, that the liability of health institutions (public or private) may only be upheld in cases of wrongdoing or due to a defect in a health product. To this issue of distinction should be added the question of the respective definitions of “supplied” equipment and “used” equipment. By decision issued on 21st December 2011, the ECJ ruled that the member States may organize a regime of liability specific to the public hospitals due to the defective nature of the devices that they used in the course of healthcare services provided to patients. The decision of the ECJ also gives rise to the opportunity to look at the arguments in defence which may be used by manufacturers and health institutions depending on whether they have only used the devices or also provided them to the patient. This specific regime is an alternative to the regime arising from the directive: patients may, at their choice, either sue the hospital on the ground of the no-fault liability or sue the manufacturer on that of the directive. The ECJ ruling keeps silent on the liability of the hospital that supplies the device to the patient (ortheses, implantable devices like prostheses). Only the directive regime should apply to this situation.

New decision rules for exact search in N-Queens

This paper presents a set of new decision rules for exact search in N-Queens. Apart from new tiebreaking strategies for value and variable ordering, we introduce the notion of `free diagonal' for decision taking at each step of the search. With the proposed new decision heuristic the number of subproblems needed to enumerate the first K solutions (typically K = 1, 10 and 100) is greatly reduced w.r.t. other algorithms and constitutes empirical evidence that the average solution density (or its inverse, the number of subproblems per solution) remains constant independent of N. Specifically finding a valid configuration was backtrack free in 994 cases out of 1,000, an almost perfect decision ratio. This research is part of a bigger project which aims at deriving new decision rules for CSP domains by evaluating, at each step, a constraint value graph G c . N-Queens has adapted well to this strategy: domain independent rules are inferred directly from G c whereas domain dependent knowledge is represented by an induced hypergraph over G c and computed by similar domain independent techniques. Prior work on the Number Place problem also yielded similar encouraging results.

Compression of Dynamic 3D Meshes and Progressive Displaying

This paper introduces a new dynamic 3D mesh representation that provides 3D animation support of progressive display and drastically reduces the amount of storage space required for 3D animation. The primary purpose of progressive display is to allow viewers to get animation as quickly as possible, rather than having to wait until all data has been downloaded. In other words, this method allows for the simultaneous transmission and playing of 3D animation. Experiments show that coarser 3D animation could be reconstructed with as little as 150KB of data transferred. Using the sustained transmission of refined operators, viewers feel that resolution approaches that of the original animation. The methods used in this study are based on a compression technique commonly used in 3D animation - clustered principle component analysis, using the linearly independent rules of principle components, so that animation can be stored using smaller amounts of data. This method can be coupled with streaming technology to reconstruct animation through iterative updating. Each principle component is a portion of the streaming data to be stored and transmitted after compression, as well as a refined operator during the animation update process. This paper considers errors and rate-distortion optimization, and introduces weighted progressive transmitting (WPT), using refined sequences from optimized principle components, so that each refinement yields an increase in quality. In other words, with identical data size, this method allows each principle component to reduce allowable error and provide the highest quality 3D animation.

Decolonization in South Asia: meanings of freedom in post-independence West Bengal, 1947-52

This book explores the meanings and complexities of India’s experience of transition from colonial to the post-colonial period. It focuses on the first five years – from independence on 15th August 1947 to the first general election in January 1952 – in the politics of West Bengal, the new Indian province that was created as a result of the Partition. The author, a specialist on the history of modern India, discusses what freedom actually meant to various individuals, communities and political parties, how they responded to it, how they extended its meaning and how in their anxiety to confront the realities of free India, they began to invent new enemies of their newly acquired freedom. By emphasising the representations of popular mentality rather than the institutional changes brought in by the process of decolonization, he draws attention to other concerns and anxieties that were related to the problems of coming to terms with the newly achieved freedom and the responsibility of devising independent rules of governance that would suit the historic needs of a pluralist nation. Decolonization in South Asia analyses the transitional politics of West Bengal in light of recent developments in postcolonial theory on nationalism, treating the ‘nation’ as a space for contestation, rather than a natural breeding ground for homogeneity in the complex political scenario of post-independence India. It will appeal to academics interested in political science, sociology, social anthropology and cultural and Asian studies.

Manual and automated performance optimization of model transformation systems

Model-based development is one of the most promising solutions for several problems of industrial software engineering. Graph transformation is a proven method for processing domain-specific models. However, in order to be used by domain experts without graph transformation experts, it must be fast even if not tweaked for speed manually based on knowledge available only to the implementers of the transformation system. In this paper, we compare the performance of such manual optimizations with a solution using automated optimization based on sharing of matches between overlapping left-hand-sides of sequentially independent rules. This yields a 11% improvement in our scenario, although our prototypical implementation only exploits overlapping between, at most, two rules, and the analyzed benchmark does not contain many cases where the optimization is applicable.

Power Spectral Analysis of Elementary Cellular Automata

Spectral analysis of elementary cellular automata is performed. A power spectrum is calculated from the evolution of 88 independent rules starting from random initial configurations. As a result, it is found that rule 110 exhibits 1/f noise during the longest time steps. Rule 110 has proved to be capable of supporting universal computation. These results suggest that there is a relationship between computational universality and 1/f noise in cellular automata.

Promise as Practice Reason

To promise someone to do something is to commit oneself to that person to do that thing, but what does that commitment consist of? Some think a promissory commitment is an obligation to do what’s promised, and that while promising practices facilitate the creation of promissory obligations, they are not essential to them. I favor the broadly Humean view in which, when it comes to promises (and so promissory obligations), practices are of the essence. I propose the Practice Reason Account of promises, according to which a promise is basically to give oneself a self-interested practice reason to do what’s promised. One achieves this feat by invoking self-enforcing independent practice rules thanks to which one’s doing what’s promised preserves one’s promissory trust(worthiness) and promising power. However, nothing in this account supports the Hume-Rawls claim that promise-keeping or promise-breaking is right just when and because it conforms to practice rules that are justified by their good- or right-making properties.

Integration of Syntactic Analysis and Semantic Interpretation Based on Equivalent Transformation

Making an efficient algorithm for natural language understanding by means of flexible and cooperative interaction between syntactic analysis and semantic interpretation is very difficult. In order to overcome the difficulties, the present paper proposes a new method for designing knowledge processing systems, the computation of which is based on equivalent transformation of declarative descriptions. Basic procedures for syntactic analysis and semantic interpretation are formalized as mutually independent equivalent transformation rules. Rule selection is dynamically determined flexibly during execution by a general principle independent of the domain of sentences.

Alternate Decision Rules, the Flexibility Premium, and Land Development Over Time and Under Uncertainty

The Arrow-Fisher-Henry (AFH) analysis of land development under uncertainty has been conducted in a two period model. Recently, Capozza and Helsley (1990), Batabyal (1996, 1997, 2000), and others have analyzed the question of land development under uncertainty in a multi-period setting. We extend this literature by examining the role that time independent and time dependent decision rules play in the decision to develop land over time and under uncertainty. We first construct a dynamic and stochastic model of decision making in the context of land development. Next, we use this model to analyze the expected profit of a landowner when this landowner uses, respectively, time independent and time dependent decision rules. Finally, we compare and contrast the properties of time independent and time dependent decision rules and we discuss the magnitude of the premium stemming from the maintenance of temporal flexibility in decision making.

Method and apparatus for continuous speech recognition using a layered, self-adjusting decoded network

A continuous speech decoder that is built up of multiple layers. Each of the layers uses independent knowledge sources and rules, but all the layers cooperate to quickly decode the speech input into words. A first layer is concerned with acoustic data, a second layer with phone data of speech and a third layer concerns word data and word sequences. By separating these layers, the higher layers can be made time independent and asynchronous. Thus the asynchronous layers can process data quickly and give fast support to the first layer which keeps a dynamic record called a dynamic network of the most likely continuous speech results. The speed and separation of this decoder allows better memory efficiency and better decoder results compared to previously known continuous speech decoders.

Identifying a fuzzy model by using the bipartite membership functions

The gradient descent method and genetic algorithms have been widely used to refine fuzzy models constructed for the given data. This paper approaches from another viewpoint to adjusting the fuzzy model built for the preprocessed data. The membership functions defined for each premise variable are equally distributed and fixed in the transformed domain. To better identify the fuzzy model, either the transformation functions or consequent parts of fuzzy rules or both need to be optimized. Since adjusting a rule to satisfy one pattern may deteriorate the others performance and result in a lengthy tuning process, we then treat each triangular membership function as two disjoint ones such that each fuzzy rule is divided into mutually independent rules. This in turn benefits the refinement of consequent parts in the fuzzy rules since adjusting a rule will not affect the others. Not only the simulation results from the proposed model will be demonstrated but also the results from the conventional approaches will be given for comparisons. We use the least squared method to calculate the desired consequent real numbers for the data located in the same region of transformed domain. The conformity of the after-tuned consequent parts in the fuzzy rules with the desired values further verifies the effectiveness of the presented methodology.

Implementing agent teams in dynamic multiagent environments

Teamwork is becoming increasingly critical in multiagent environments ranging from virtual environments for training and education, to information integration on the internet, to potential multirobotic space missions. Teamwork in such complex, dynamic environments is more than a simple union of simultaneous individual activity, even if supplemented with preplanned coordination. Indeed, in these dynamic environments, unanticipated events can easily cause a breakdown in such preplanned coordination. The central hypothesis in this article is that for effective teamwork, agents should be provided explicit representation of team goals and plans, as well as an explicit representation of a model of teamwork to support the execution of team plans. In our work, this model of teamwork takes the form of a set of domain independent rules that clearly outline an agent's commitments and responsibilities as a participant in team activities, and thus guide the agent's social activities while executing team plans. This article describes two implementations of agent-teams based on the above principles, one for a realworld helicopter combat simulation, and one for the RoboCup soccer simulation. The article also provides a preliminary comparison of the two agent-teams to illustrate some of the strengths and weaknesses of RoboCup as a common test bed for multiagent systems.

Simulator of Intelligent Controllers

This paper describes a personal computer program used at the Department of Control Science, Technical University of Brno for demonstration and research of intelligent controllers which are based on the expert system paradigm. The program is able to simulate the behavior of a discrete controller with three layers of functionality - the control feedback loop, the adaptive loop and the expert system loop. The knowledge base of the expert system is organized as ordered set of independent rules.

Les verbes causatifs « polymorphiques » : les prédicats complexes en français

A. Zaenen & M. Dalrymple : The syntactic analysis of French causative constructions relies on the distinction, crucial in the LFG formalism, between the constituent structure (hierarchical : faire takes a VP complement) and the functional structure (flat : faire and the infinitival V form a complex predicate in a unique functional structure). The semantic representation is constructed from the f-structure, lexical semantic information (which specifies semantic roles associated with each predicate), and independent rules which map functions onto semantic roles. This construction takes the general form of a deduction in linear logic, whose property of resource sensitivity is exploited to give the effect of completeness and coherence, which are general constraints on linguistic structures.

A decision-based approach: application to the automatic design of process planning

Abstract The notion of centre of decision presented in this article defines a conceptual and generic model enabling us to represent and use expert knowledge. It is suitable when the problem to be solved can be broken down into a sum of interdependent subproblems. Actions can be planned progressively and previous decisions can he modified by a backtrack mechanism. This principle is iterative. The structure is made up of many independent rules and an action plan. The customization of the application is possible even if the software evolves with future updates. This model has been applied in the LURPA-TOUR software which is a computer-aided process planning system for rotational parts.

Prosodic overlay and headless feet in Yidip

In this paper we reexamine the prosodic system of Yidiji (Australian; Dixon 1977a, b; 1991) as a case supporting an approach to stress assignment in which the construction of bounded feet and the implementation of metrical heads within them occur as separate events (the SEPARABILITY hypothesis; Halle & Vergnaud 1987a,b (= H&V)). Specifically, we argue that a layer of feet assigned early in Yidiji phonological derivations is unheaded and insensitive to weight distinctions, and plays a role in allomorphy. Metrical heads are later assigned to these constituents by independent rules operating under quantity-sensitive principles. In other words, Yidiji employs an additive metrical system in which stressable heads are overlaid on existing foot structures (prosodic overlay). It is the interaction between the outputs of these operations which produces the flexible rhythmic structure for which Yidiji is known. This flexibility is exemplified by the forms in (la) and (lb) (from Dixon 1977a: 40–41), where stress falls on even-numbered and odd-numbered syllables respectively, counted from the left.

An economic approach to job shop performance analysis

This paper focuses on the development of an economic approach to selecting an optimal job shop operating policy. A framework to include all relevant costs is first presented. A method of setting cost-minimizing due dates, based on flowtime forecasts and job specific cost considerations, is then developed. By formulating total relevant costs in terms of utilization, the optimal utilization level for a given dispatch rule can be analytically determined. Total profits associated with different dispatch rules can then be compared. Results show that due-date dependent dispatch rules outperform due-date independent rules.