100 Current Papers in Artificial Intelligence, Automated Reasoning and Agent Programming. Number 3

Nissim Francez, Roy Dychkhoff. A Note on Harmony. Journal of Philosophical Logic, 41:613-628.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10992-011-9208-0
Open Access?: Computational Logic Publications, St. Andrews University.

( A Logic Paper that caught my Eye this week )

This entry was originally posted at http://purplecat.dreamwidth.org/68488.html.

100 Current Papers in Artificial Intelligence, Automated Reasoning and Agent Programming. Number 2

Jacob M. Howe and Andy King, A Pearl on SAT and SMT Solving in Prolog, Theoretical Computer Science Volume 435, 1 June 2012, Pages 43–55.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.bbr.2011.03.031
Open Access: Available from Kent School of Computing Publication Index: http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/pubs/2012/3136/index.html

I'm not sure quite how the terminology of a programming pearl arose. It denotes a neat, elegant or otherwise illuminating solution to some programming problem. In this case the programming pearl shows how a solver for a certain sort of logic can be programmed up in only 22 lines of of the Prolog Programming language.

( Details under the Cut )

This entry was originally posted at http://purplecat.dreamwidth.org/67842.html.

Tom Baker again. I am beginning to suspect my random number generator is more pseudo than random.

I was tempted to start this review with some joke about going from the sublime to the ridiculous but I've actually always had a soft spot for The Horns of Nimon. I don't really know enough about the evolution of fandom opinion, or even current thought about the story, but my suspicion is that a lot of the dislike stems from a sense that "Doctor Who is Serious SF, dammit!" and one thing The Horns of Nimon is making no pretence to be is serious.

( More under the cut )

At the end of the day, as long as you are not expecting something that is taking itself particularly seriously, there is nothing particularly terrible about The Horns of Nimon. It's the kind of Who story it is easy to laugh at, but it's clearly inviting you to laugh at it and if you can't see that then you are sort of missing the point. At the same time it has a good enough story to hold the interest for the 100 minutes or so it takes to play out. I remain somewhat mystified by the vilification it meets with in some quarters.

This entry was originally posted at http://purplecat.dreamwidth.org/67812.html.

Another "classic" Doctor Who episode which well deserves its status. The similarities to Masque of Mandragora, reveal the extent to which there was very much a formula being employed during a lot of the Hinchcliffe years - not that I think anyone has ever denied this.

( Spoilers under the cut )

This entry was originally posted at http://purplecat.dreamwidth.org/67234.html.

100 Current Papers in Artificial Intelligence, Automated Reasoning and Agent Programming. Number 1.

Catholijn M. Jonker, Viara Popova, Alexei Sharpanskykh, Jan Treur, and Pınar Yolum. Formal Framework to Support Organizational Design. Knowledge-Based Systems 31:89-105, 2012.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.knosys.2012.02.011
Open Access?: Sadly no.

I was half hoping to start these posts with a terribly exciting AI paper but sadly nothing terribly exciting caught my eye in the various Tables of Contents last week. However this is very much a bread-and-butter AI paper and so in some ways I'm not so sorry to be starting out with it, since it gives a good impression of what a lot of AI types do when they are not trying to develop machines that will take over the world and wipe-out humanity.

( More Under the Cut )

So there you go, not terribly exciting, but a fairly typical current paper in artificial intelligence.

This entry was originally posted at http://purplecat.dreamwidth.org/66833.html.

In the name of clearing out my "to post" backlog I thought I'd do a quick post about a talk we attended at Eastercon on the Illustrated Police News (its relevance to Eastercon is somewhat beyond me, but that is often the case with Eastercon talks, panels and activities). It was given by Linda Stratmann and based on her book Cruel Deeds and Dreadful Calamities: the Illustrated Police News 1864-1938 an illustrated history of the notorious newspaper, (British Library, March 2011). We are vaguely considering purchasing this as Christmas presents for misc relatives.

Linda gave an interesting overview of the nature of the publication, its interests and peculiarities and various recurring themes and motifs but the real stars were the illustrations themselves. I'm particularly fond of the captions! Anyway below the cut are some culled from Google's image search.

( The Illustrated Police News )

Sadly I couldn't find the truly splendid one of a female cuban revolutionary in the middle of a jailbreak, busting elegantly out of her corsets, legs braced apart, firing a gun with one hand and waving a flag with the other...

This entry was originally posted at http://purplecat.dreamwidth.org/66523.html.

At the end of march I went to a conference in Tallinn, Estonia. It was actually a really good conference and I came away with lots of thoughts though I'm not really intending to blog about them since they are along the lines of "more efficient ways to generate Büchi Automata" which I suspect won't mean much to my flist. Though there was an interesting and more generally accessible talk about load balancing in the German national grid with a side order on getting more trains onto a single European train track which I may give an overview of at some point (*stares dubiously at list of "things it might be interesting to blog about" which has grow scarily long of late*)

Anyway, I actually think my boss was a little bemused by my sudden enthusiasm for foreign travel when this came up. Our group was approached by one of the attached workshops and asked if anyone would like to give a talk and he rather dubiously passed the question on and asked if anyone was interested in going. Normally I'm not terribly excited at the prospect of spending a week away from home, but I'd seen pictures of Tallinn and it looked terribly pretty.

( I was not disappointed. Gratuitously long Picspam under the cut )

This entry was originally posted at http://purplecat.dreamwidth.org/66289.html.

Well this was the first real challenge the randomiser threw our way. The Savages no longer exists in the BBC archives, though there are off-air sound recordings and a tele-snap archive. I'm not quite sure who is responsible for the combination of these into a set of videos on YouTube, but someone has done so and I somewhat dubiously mentioned this to my tame "normal viewer" who responded with surprising enthusiasm to the idea of watching them and added, as a rider, that the "randomiser had spoken".

( So we spent several evenings watching grainy pictures with tinny sound overlaid )

I would be lying if I pretended that this was something that could be enjoyed by anyone but hard-core fans of the show. But underneath the poor visuals and sound is a nicely engaging story with what seem like decent performances. It is a shame a better version is no longer available.

This entry was originally posted at http://purplecat.dreamwidth.org/65875.html.

Because you all so want to read more thoughts by me...

This has been doing the rounds: a challenge to make 100 posts on the subject of your choice (no time limit).




{Take the 100 Things challenge!}

Actually, I've been thinking recently about ways to keep myself more abreast of the literature in my field which I tend to read somewhat sporadically. So the idea of some kind of one woman journal club doesn't immediately seem like a bad one. I'm going to attempt to blog about 100 current academic papers in my field (artificial intelligence, automated reasoning and agent programming) and, if possible, not make them sound too impenetrable. Given there's no time limit on this, I'm thinking I should aim for about one post per week, which should keep this going for two years by which point frankly either it will have become a habit or will have long fallen by the wayside.

This entry was originally posted at http://purplecat.dreamwidth.org/65437.html.

Can you spot the stars that aren't moving?



Further explanations at NASA's astronomy picture of the day.

This entry was originally posted at http://purplecat.dreamwidth.org/64910.html.