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The chapter from the book introduces the delay theory, whose purpose is the modeling of the asynchronous circuits from digital electrical engineering with ordinary and differential pseudo-boolean equations.
In this article, we shall describe some of the most interesting topics in the subject of Complexity Science for a general audience. Anyone with a solid foundation in high school mathematics (with some calculus) and an elementary understanding of computer programming will be able to follow this article. First, we shall explain the significance of the P versus NP problem and solve it. Next, we shall describe two other famous mathematics problems, the Collatz 3n+1 Conjecture and the Riemann Hypothesis, and show how both Chaitin's incompleteness theorem and Wolfram's notion of "computational irreducibility" are important for understanding why no one has, as of yet, solved these two problems.
Emergence (macro-level effects from micro-level causes) is at the heart of the conflict between reductionism and functionalism. How can there be autonomous higher level laws of nature (the functionalist claim) if everything can be reduced to the fundamental forces of physics (the reductionist position)? We cut through this debate by applying a computer science lens to the way we view nature. We conclude (a) that what functionalism calls the special sciences (sciences other than physics) do indeed study autonomous laws and furthermore that those laws pertain to real higher level entities but (b) that interactions among such higher-level entities is epiphenomenal in that they can always be reduced to primitive physical forces. In other words, epiphenomena, which we will identify with emergent phenomena, do real higher-level work. The proposed perspective provides a framework for understanding many thorny issues including the nature of entities, stigmergy, the evolution of complexity, phase transitions, supervenience, and downward entailment. We also discuss some practical considerations pertaining to systems of systems and the limitations of modeling.
The technical challenges of scaling websites with large and growing member bases, like social networking sites, are numerous. One of these challenges is how to evenly distribute the growing member base across all available resources. This paper will explore various methods that address this issue. The techniques used in this paper can be generalized and applied to various other problems that need to distribute data evenly amongst a finite amount of resources.
Physical processes are computations only when we use them to externalize thought. Computation is the performance of one or more fixed processes within a contingent environment. We reformulate the Church-Turing thesis so that it applies to programs rather than to computability. When suitably formulated agent-based computing in an open, multi-scalar environment represents the current consensus view of how we interact with the world. But we don't know how to formulate multi-scalar environments.
In 1960s V.Geodakian proposed a theory that explains sexes as a mechanism for evolutionary adaptation of the species to changing environmental conditions. In 2001 V.Iskrin refined and augmented the concepts of Geodakian and gave a new and interesting explanation to several phenomena which involve sex, and sex ratio, including the war-years phenomena. He also introduced a new concept of the "catastrophic sex ratio." This note is an attempt to digest technical aspects of the new ideas by Iskrin.
This is a rough draft synopsis of a book presently in preparation. This book provides a systematic critique of the software industry. This critique is accomplished using classical methods in practical design science.
The asynchronous systems $f$ are the models of the asynchronous circuits from digital electrical engineering. They are multi-valued functions that associate to each input $u:\mathbf{R}\to \{0,1\}^{m}$ a set of states $x\in f(u),$ where $x:\mathbf{R}\to \{0,1\}^{n}.$ The intersection of the systems allows adding supplementary conditions in modeling and the union of the systems allows considering the validity of one of two systems in modeling, for example when testing the asynchronous circuits and the circuit is supposed to be 'good' or 'bad'. The purpose of the paper is that of analyzing the intersection and the union against the initial/final states, initial/final time, initial/final state functions, subsystems, dual systems, inverse systems, Cartesian product of systems, parallel connection and serial connection of systems.
In this paper we show that the initial philosophy used in designing and developing UNIX in early times has been forgotten due to "fast practices". We question the leitmotif that microkernels, though being by design adherent to the KISS principle, have a number of context switches higher than their monolithic counterparts, running a test suite and verify the results with standard statistical validation tests. We advocate a wiser distribution of shared libraries by statistically analyzing the weight of each shared object in a typical UNIX system, showing that the majority of shared libraries exist in a common space for no real evidence of need. Finally we examine the UNIX heritage with an historical point of view, noticing how habits swiftly replaced the intents of the original authors, moving the focus from the earliest purpose of is avoiding complications, keeping a system simple to use and maintain.
Computer science is seeing a decline in enrollment at all levels of education, including undergraduate and graduate study. This paper reports on the results of a study conducted at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign which evaluated students attitudes regarding three areas which can contribute to improved enrollment in the Department of Computer Science: Recruitment, preparation and retention. The results of our study saw two themes. First, the department's tight research focus appears to draw significant attention from other activities -- such as teaching, service, and other community-building activities -- that are necessary for a department's excellence. Yet, as demonstrated by our second theme, one partial solution is to better promote such activities already employed by the department to its students and faculty. Based on our results, we make recommendations for improvements and enhancements based on the current state of practice at peer institutions.
The author argues to Silicon Valley that the most important and powerful part of computer science is work that is simultaneously theoretical and practical. He particularly considers the intersection of the theory of algorithms and practical software development. He combines examples from the development of the TeX typesetting system with clever jokes, criticisms, and encouragements.
All information about physical objects including humans, buildings, processes, and organizations will be online. This trend is both desirable and inevitable. Cyberspace will provide the basis for wonderful new ways to inform, entertain, and educate people. The information and the corresponding systems will streamline commerce, but will also provide new levels of personal service, health care, and automation. The most significant benefit will be a breakthrough in our ability to remotely communicate with one another using all our senses. The ACM and the transistor were born in 1947. At that time the stored program computer was a revolutionary idea and the transistor was just a curiosity. Both ideas evolved rapidly. By the mid 1960s integrated circuits appeared -- allowing mass fabrication of transistors on silicon substrates. This allowed low-cost mass-produced computers. These technologies enabled extraordinary increases in processing speed and memory coupled with extraordinary price declines. The only form of processing and memory more easily, cheaply, and rapidly fabricated is the human brain. Peter Cohrane (1996) estimates the brain to have a processing power of around 1000 million-million operations per second, (one Petaops) and a memory of 10 Terabytes. If current trends continue, computers could have these capabilities by 2047. Such computers could be 'on body' personal assistants able to recall everything one reads, hears, and sees.
Each researcher should have a full shelf---physical or virtual---of books on writing and editing prose. Though we make no claim to any special degree of expertise, we recently edited a book of complexity theory surveys (Complexity Theory Retrospective II, Springer-Verlag, 1997), and in doing so we were brought into particularly close contact with the subject of this article, and with a number of the excellent resources available to writers and editors. In this article, we list some of these resources, and we also relate some of the adventures we had as our book moved from concept to reality.
The goal of this paper is to define and analyze systems which exhibit brittle behavior. This behavior is characterized by a sudden and steep decline in performance as the system approaches the limits of tolerance. This can be due to input parameters which exceed a specified input, or environmental conditions which exceed specified operating boundaries. An analogy is made between brittle commmunication systems in particular and materials science.
In this short article, we look at an old logical puzzle, its solution and proof and discuss some interesting aspects concerning its representation in a logic programming language like Prolog. We also discuss an intriguing information theoretic aspect of the puzzle.
Charles Babbage's vision of computing has largely been realized. We are on the verge of realizing Vannevar Bush's Memex. But, we are some distance from passing the Turing Test. These three visions and their associated problems have provided long-range research goals for many of us. For example, the scalability problem has motivated me for several decades. This talk defines a set of fundamental research problems that broaden the Babbage, Bush, and Turing visions. They extend Babbage's computational goal to include highly-secure, highly-available, self-programming, self-managing, and self-replicating systems. They extend Bush's Memex vision to include a system that automatically organizes, indexes, digests, evaluates, and summarizes information (as well as a human might). Another group of problems extends Turing's vision of intelligent machines to include prosthetic vision, speech, hearing, and other senses. Each problem is simply stated and each is orthogonal from the others, though they share some common core technologies
Our technologies complexify our environments. Thus, new technologies need to deal with more and more complexity. Several efforts have been made to deal with this complexity using the concept of self-organization. However, in order to promote its use and understanding, we must first have a pragmatic understanding of complexity and self-organization. This paper presents a conceptual framework for speaking about self-organizing systems. The aim is to provide a methodology useful for designing and controlling systems developed to solve complex problems. First, practical notions of complexity and self-organization are given. Then, starting from the agent metaphor, a conceptual framework is presented. This provides formal ways of speaking about "satisfaction" of elements and systems. The main premise of the methodology claims that reducing the "friction" or "interference" of interactions between elements of a system will result in a higher "satisfaction" of the system, i.e. better performance. The methodology discusses different ways in which this can be achieved. A case study on self-organizing traffic lights illustrates the ideas presented in the paper.
Richard Feynman's observation that quantum mechanical effects could not be simulated efficiently on a computer led to speculation that computation in general could be done more efficiently if it used quantum effects. This speculation appeared justified when Peter Shor described a polynomial time quantum algorithm for factoring integers. In quantum systems, the computational space increases exponentially with the size of the system which enables exponential parallelism. This parallelism could lead to exponentially faster quantum algorithms than possible classically. The catch is that accessing the results, which requires measurement, proves tricky and requires new non-traditional programming techniques. The aim of this paper is to guide computer scientists and other non-physicists through the conceptual and notational barriers that separate quantum computing from conventional computing. We introduce basic principles of quantum mechanics to explain where the power of quantum computers comes from and why it is difficult to harness. We describe quantum cryptography, teleportation, and dense coding. Various approaches to harnessing the power of quantum parallelism are explained, including Shor's algorithm, Grover's algorithm, and Hogg's algorithms. We conclude with a discussion of quantum error correction.