Related papers: The Problem Of Grue Isn't
Fuzziness and randomicity widespread exist in natural science, engineering, technology and social science. The purpose of this paper is to present a new logic - uncertain propositional logic which can deal with both fuzziness by taking…
The interpolation problem is a natural and fundamental question whose roots trace back to ancient Greece. The story is long and rich, with many chapters, and a complete solution has been obtained only recently. Exploring it leads us on a…
In this lecture I will talk about three mathematical puzzles involving mathematics and computation that have preoccupied me over the years. The first puzzle is to understand the amazing success of the simplex algorithm for linear…
Gravitation has posed a puzzle and a problem for many decades. Attempts to unify it with other fundamental interactions have failed. These problems and puzzles have been underscored by the likes of Witten and Weinberg. We survey this and…
The infamous 3x+1 conjecture spread by Lothar Collatz in 1952, despite its elementary formulation, remained unproved for over 60 years. From the heuristical probabilistic approach to the complex mapping of the algorithm, the scientific…
{\bf Abstract.} The present article is an essay about mathematical intuition and Artificial intelligence (A.I.), followed by a guided excursion to a well-known open problem. It has two objectives. The first is to reconcile the way of…
This article discusses what can be proved about the foundations of mathematics using the notions of algorithm and information. The first part is retrospective, and presents a beautiful antique, Godel's proof, the first modern incompleteness…
In one of their seminal articles on allowable sequences, Goodman and Pollack gave combinatorial generalizations for three problems in discrete geometry, one of which being the Dirac conjecture. According to this conjecture, any set of $n$…
The likelihood principle makes strong claims about the nature of statistical evidence but is controversial. Its claims are undermined by the existence of several examples that are assumed to show that it allows, with unity probability,…
The role of probability appears unchallenged as the key measure of uncertainty, used among other things for practical induction in the empirical sciences. Yet, Popper was emphatic in his rejection of inductive probability and of the logical…
The relationship between the complexity classes P and NP is a question that has not yet been answered by the Theory of Computation. The existence of a language in NP, proven not to belong to P, is sufficient evidence to establish the…
In 1982, Raymond Smullyan published an article, "The Asylum of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether," that consists of a series of puzzles. These were later reprinted in the anthology, "The Lady or The Tiger? and Other Logic Puzzles." The last…
In this methodological article on experimental-yet-rigorous enumerative combinatorics, we use two instructive case studies, to show that often, just like Alexander the Great before us, the simple, "cheating" solution to a hard problem is…
The Simulation Argument posed by Bostrom (2003) suggests that we may be living inside a sophisticated computer simulation. If post-human civilizations eventually have both the capability and desire to generate such Bostrom-like simulations,…
Most discussions of G\"odel's theorems fall into one of two types: either they emphasize perceived philosophical, cultural "meanings" of the theorems, and perhaps sketch some of the ideas of the proofs, usually relating G\"odel's proofs to…
Quantum mechanics predicts many surprising phenomena, including the two-slit interference of electrons. It has often been claimed that these phenomena cannot be understood in classical terms. But the meaning of "classical" is often not…
Uncertainty enters into human reasoning and inference in at least two ways. It is reasonable to suppose that there will be roles for these distinct uses of uncertainty also in automated reasoning.
The Halting Problem is ill-conceived and ill-defined.
Question: I have five fingers but I am not alive. What am I? Answer: a glove. Answering such a riddle-style question is a challenging cognitive process, in that it requires complex commonsense reasoning abilities, an understanding of…
Incomputability as a mathematical notion arose from work of Alan Turing and Alonzo Church in the 1930s. Like Turing himself, it attracted less attention than it deserved beyond the confines of mathematics. Today our experiences in computer…