Related papers: A static theory of promises

Prediction is a complex notion, and different predictors (such as people, computer programs, and probabilistic theories) can pursue very different goals. In this paper I will review some popular kinds of prediction and argue that the theory…

The quantum-mechanical description of the world, including human observers, makes substantial use of entanglement. In order to understand this, we need to adopt concepts of truth, probability and time which are unfamiliar in modern…

Anthropic models can give testable predictions, which can be confirmed or falsified at a specified confidence level. This is illustrated using the successful prediction of the cosmological constant as an example. The history and the nature…

While the utility of well-chosen abstractions for understanding and predicting the behaviour of complex systems is well appreciated, precisely what an abstraction $\textit{is}$ has so far has largely eluded mathematical formalization. In…

The interplay between string theory and cosmology is very promising. Since string theory will yield a quantum theory of space-time and unify all forces of nature, it has the potential of addressing many of the conceptual problems of the…

A stable joint plan should guarantee the achievement of a designer's goal in a multi-agent environment, while ensuring that deviations from the prescribed plan would be detected. We present a computational framework where stable joint plans…

There is available an ever-increasing variety of procedures for managing uncertainty. These methods are discussed in the literature of artificial intelligence, as well as in the literature of philosophy of science. Heretofore these methods…

Our lives become increasingly dependent on safety- and security-critical systems, so formal techniques are advocated for engineering such systems. One of such techniques is validation obligations that enable formalizing requirements early…

In this introductory note, I describe my particular view of the notion of ontological commitments as honest and pragmatic working hypotheses that assume the existence (out there) of certain entities represented by the symbols in our theory.…

Resilience is a rehashed concept in natural hazard management - resilience of cities to earthquakes, to floods, to fire, etc. In a word, a system is said to be resilient if there exists a strategy that can drive the system state back to…

Game semantics is a rich and successful class of denotational models for programming languages. Most game models feature a rather intuitive setup, yet surprisingly difficult proofs of such basic results as associativity of composition of…

Uncertainty may be taken to characterize inferences, their conclusions, their premises or all three. Under some treatments of uncertainty, the inferences itself is never characterized by uncertainty. We explore both the significance of…

We introduce a new mathematical framework for the probabilistic description of an experiment on a system of any type in terms of information representing this system initially. Based on the notions of an information state and a generalized…

The semantics and dynamics of `attention' are closely related to promise theoretic notions developed for autonomous agents and can thus easily be written down in promise framework. In this way one may establish a bridge between vectorized…

Automated negotiation can be an efficient method for resolving conflict and redistributing resources in a coalition setting. Automated negotiation has already seen increased usage in fields such as e-commerce and power distribution in smart…

Humans and animals have the ability to reason and make predictions about different courses of action at many time scales. In reinforcement learning, option models (Sutton, Precup \& Singh, 1999; Precup, 2000) provide the framework for this…

We derive a simple mathematical "theory" to show that two decision-making entities can work better together only if at least one of them is occasionally willing to stay neutral. This provides a mathematical "justification" for an age-old…

Observations on the past provide some hints about what will happen in the future, and this can be quantified using information theory. The ``predictive information'' defined in this way has connections to measures of complexity that have…

We propose a conjugate logic that can capture the behavior of quantum and quantum-like systems. The proposal is similar to the more generic concept of epistemic logic: it encodes knowledge or perhaps more correctly, predictions about…

We propose a new approach for solving a class of discrete decision making problems under uncertainty with positive cost. This issue concerns multiple and diverse fields such as engineering, economics, artificial intelligence, cognitive…