Related papers: Anna Karenina and The Two Envelopes Problem
The ``Gibbs Paradox'' refers to several related questions concerning entropy in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics: whether it is an extensive quantity or not, how it changes when identical particles are mixed, and the proper way to…
The host of a game presents two indistinguishable envelopes to an agent. One of the envelopes is randomly selected and allocated to the agent. The agent is informed that the monetary content of one of the envelopes is twice that of the…
Logical theories have been developed which have allowed temporal reasoning about eventualities (a la Galton) such as states, processes, actions, events, processes and complex eventualities such as sequences and recurrences of other…
The growth dynamics of complex systems often exhibit statistical regularities involving power-law relationships. For real finite complex systems formed by countable tokens (animals, words) as instances of distinct types (species, dictionary…
Unexpectedness is a central concept in Simplicity Theory, a theory of cognition relating various inferential processes to the computation of Kolmogorov complexities, rather than probabilities. Its predictive power has been confirmed by…
Entropy is critically examined as a fundamental concept in contemporary science and informatics. Although the typical Shannon entropy provides a proper framework for describing the canonical ensemble, it fails to represent adequately the…
The way a rational agent changes her belief in certain propositions/hypotheses in the light of new evidence lies at the heart of Bayesian inference. The basic natural assumption, as summarized in van Fraassen's Reflection Principle…
Using the language of finite element exterior calculus, we define two families of $H^1$-conforming finite element spaces over pyramids with a parallelogram base. The first family has matching polynomial traces with tensor product elements…
Recent theoretical progress in nonequilibrium thermodynamics, linking the physical principle of Maximum Entropy Production ("MEP") to the information-theoretical "MaxEnt" principle of scientific inference, together with conjectures from…
There is a widespread assumption that the universe in general, and the Earth's biosphere in particular, is becoming more complex over time. This paper formulates this assumption as a macroscopic law, the law of increasing complexity, for a…
Since its early beginnings, mankind has put to test many different society forms, and this fact raises a complex of interesting questions. The objective of this paper is to present a general population model which takes essential features…
The Union Closed Sets Conjecture states that in every finite, nontrivial set family closed under taking unions there is an element contained in at least half of all the sets of the family. We investigate two new directions with respect to…
The nonnegative inverse eigenvalue problem (NIEP) asks which lists of $n$ complex numbers (counting multiplicity) occur as the eigenvalues of some $n$-by-$n$ entry-wise nonnegative matrix. The NIEP has a long history and is a known hard…
In this paper the claim that Zeno's paradoxes have been solved is contested. Although no one has ever touched Zeno without refuting him (Whitehead), it will be our aim to show that, whatever it was that was refuted, it was certainly not…
Topological entanglement entropy (TEE), the sub-leading term in the entanglement entropy of topological order, is the direct evidence of the long-range entanglement. While effective in characterizing topological orders on closed manifolds,…
The classical problem of maximizing the Shannon entropy of a sum of independent random variables supported on a finite alphabet is considered and settled in the ternary case. Namely, the following theorem is established: if…
Many natural, complex systems are remarkably stable thanks to an absence of feedback acting on their elements. When described as networks, these exhibit few or no cycles, and associated matrices have small leading eigenvalues. It has been…
The Principle of Insufficient Reason (PIR) assigns equal probabilities to each alternative of a random experiment whenever there is no reason to prefer one over the other. The Maximum Entropy Principle (MaxEnt) generalizes PIR to the case…
We shall prove that the celebrated R\'enyi entropy is the first example of a new family of infinitely many multi-parametric entropies. We shall call them the $Z$-entropies. Each of them, under suitable hypotheses, generalizes the celebrated…
The disjunction effect in human decision making is often taken to show that the classical law of total probability is violated, motivating quantum-like models. We re-examine this claim for the Prisoner's Dilemma disjunction effect. Under…