Related papers: Free agency and determinism: is there a sensible d…
This article presents a formal model demonstrating that genuine autonomy, the ability of a system to self-regulate and pursue objectives, fundamentally implies computational unpredictability from an external perspective. we establish…
The impression of free will is the feeling according to which our choices are neither imposed from our inside nor from outside. It is the sense we are the ultimate cause of our acts. In direct opposition with the universal determinism, the…
There are several forms of irreducibility in computing systems, ranging from undecidability to intractability to nonlinearity. This paper is an exploration of the conceptual issues that have arisen in the course of investigating speed-up…
Real-life agents seldom have unlimited reasoning power. In this paper, we propose and study a new formal notion of computationally bounded strategic ability in multi-agent systems. The notion characterizes the ability of a set of agents to…
Emergence is a pregnant property in various fields. It is the fact for a phenomenon to appear surprisingly and to be such that it seems at first sight that it is not possible to predict its apparition. That is the reason why it has often…
In this article I propose an approach for defining replicability for prediction rules. Motivated by a recent NAS report, I start from the perspective that replicability is obtaining consistent results across studies suitable to address the…
When robots share the same workspace with other intelligent agents (e.g., other robots or humans), they must be able to reason about the behaviors of their neighboring agents while accomplishing the designated tasks. In practice,…
Free will is sometimes summarised in the philosophical literature as the subjective impression felt by an individual that he or she is the ultimate source or cause of his or her own choices. The two most common arguments for denying the…
The proliferation of agentic artificial intelligence has outpaced the conceptual tools needed to characterize agency in computational systems. Prevailing definitions mainly rely on autonomy and goal-directedness. Here, we argue for a…
What does it mean to claim that a physical or natural system computes? One answer, endorsed here, is that computing is about programming a system to behave in different ways. This paper offers an account of what it means for a physical…
We explore several concepts for analyzing the intuitive notion of computational irreducibility and we propose a robust formal definition, first in the field of cellular automata and then in the general field of any computable function f…
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…
Accountability is an often called for property of technical systems. It is a requirement for algorithmic decision systems, autonomous cyber-physical systems, and for software systems in general. As a concept, accountability goes back to the…
Though many safety-critical software systems use floating point to represent real-world input and output, programmers usually have idealized versions in mind that compute with real numbers. Significant deviations from the ideal can cause…
This paper presents a theory of systemic undecidability, reframing incomputability as a structural property of systems rather than a localized feature of specific functions or problems. We define a notion of causal embedding and prove a…
Making decisions freely presupposes that there is some indeterminacy in the environment and in the decision making engine. The former is reflected on the behavioral changes due to communicating: few changes indicate rigid environments;…
Agentic AI is rapidly proliferating across diverse real-world domains such as software engineering, yet public trust has not kept pace. The central reason is that responsibility, despite being widely discussed, remains a subjective and…
Evidence-based reasoning is at the core of many problem-solving and decision-making tasks in a wide variety of domains. Generalizing from the research and development of cognitive agents in several such domains, this paper presents progress…
Are minds subject to laws of physics? Are the laws of physics computable? Are conscious thought processes computable? Currently there is little agreement as to what are the right answers to these questions. Penrose goes one step further and…
As artificial agents become increasingly capable, what internal structure is *necessary* for an agent to act competently under uncertainty? Classical results show that optimal control can be *implemented* using belief states or world…