In this paper, we present a new task that investigates how people interact with and make judgments about towers of blocks. In Experiment~1, participants in the lab solved a series of problems in which they had to re-configure three blocks from an initial to a final configuration. We recorded whether they used one hand or two hands to do so. In Experiment~2, we asked participants online to judge whether they think the person in the lab used one or two hands. The results revealed a close correspondence between participants' actions in the lab, and the mental simulations of participants online. To explain participants' actions and mental simulations, we develop a model that plans over a symbolic representation of the situation, executes the plan using a geometric solver, and checks the plan's feasibility by taking into account the physical constraints of the scene. Our model explains participants' actions and judgments to a high degree of quantitative accuracy.

We propose to use thought-provoking children's questions (TPCQs), namely Highlights BrainPlay questions, as a new method to drive artificial intelligence research and to evaluate the capabilities of general-purpose AI systems. These questions are designed to stimulate thought and learning in children, and they can be used to do the same thing in AI systems, while demonstrating the system's reasoning capabilities to the evaluator. We introduce the TPCQ task, which which takes a TPCQ question as input and produces as output (1) answers to the question and (2) learned generalizations. We discuss how BrainPlay questions stimulate learning. We analyze 244 BrainPlay questions, and we report statistics on question type, question class, answer cardinality, answer class, types of knowledge needed, and types of reasoning needed. We find that BrainPlay questions span many aspects of intelligence. Because the answers to BrainPlay questions and the generalizations learned from them are often highly open-ended, we suggest using human judges for evaluation.

We present a parallel AND/OR Branch-and-Bound scheme that uses the power of a computational grid to push the boundaries of feasibility for combinatorial optimization. Two variants of the scheme are described, one of which aims to use machine learning techniques for parallel load balancing. In-depth analysis identifies two inherent sources of parallel search space redundancies that, together with general parallel execution overhead, can impede parallelization and render the problem far from embarrassingly parallel. We conduct extensive empirical evaluation on hundreds of CPUs, the first of its kind, with overall positive results. In a significant number of cases parallel speedup is close to the theoretical maximum and we are able to solve many very complex problem instances orders of magnitude faster than before; yet analysis of certain results also serves to demonstrate the inherent limitations of the approach due to the aforementioned redundancies.

The doctrine of double effect ($\mathcal{DDE}$) is a long-studied ethical principle that governs when actions that have both positive and negative effects are to be allowed. The goal in this paper is to automate $\mathcal{DDE}$. We briefly present $\mathcal{DDE}$, and use a first-order modal logic, the deontic cognitive event calculus, as our framework to formalize the doctrine. We present formalizations of increasingly stronger versions of the principle, including what is known as the doctrine of triple effect. We then use our framework to simulate successfully scenarios that have been used to test for the presence of the principle in human subjects. Our framework can be used in two different modes: One can use it to build $\mathcal{DDE}$-compliant autonomous systems from scratch, or one can use it to verify that a given AI system is $\mathcal{DDE}$-compliant, by applying a $\mathcal{DDE}$ layer on an existing system or model. For the latter mode, the underlying AI system can be built using any architecture (planners, deep neural networks, bayesian networks, knowledge-representation systems, or a hybrid); as long as the system exposes a few parameters in its model, such verification is possible. The role of the $\mathcal{DDE}$ layer here is akin to a (dynamic or static) software verifier that examines existing software modules. Finally, we end by presenting initial work on how one can apply our $\mathcal{DDE}$ layer to the STRIPS-style planning model, and to a modified POMDP model.This is preliminary work to illustrate the feasibility of the second mode, and we hope that our initial sketches can be useful for other researchers in incorporating DDE in their own frameworks.

The world of programming is always changing. We are constantly finding better ways to do what it is that we do. That is a great thing. Iteration is a very powerful concept. However, there are a few ideas and constructs in the computer science world that remain constant.

Automation and computer intelligence to support complex human decisions becomes essential to manage large and distributed systems in the Cloud and IoT era. Understanding the root cause of an observed symptom in a complex system has been a major problem for decades. As industry dives into the IoT world and the amount of data generated per year grows at an amazing speed, an important question is how to find appropriate mechanisms to determine root causes that can handle huge amounts of data or may provide valuable feedback in real-time. While many survey papers aim at summarizing the landscape of techniques for modelling system behavior and infering the root cause of a problem based in the resulting models, none of those focuses on analyzing how the different techniques in the literature fit growing requirements in terms of performance and scalability. In this survey, we provide a review of root-cause analysis, focusing on these particular aspects. We also provide guidance to choose the best root-cause analysis strategy depending on the requirements of a particular system and application.

If you thought solving a Rubik's cube was difficult, you were right and maths can back you up. A recent study shows that the question of whether a scrambled Rubik's cube of any size can be solved in a given number of moves is what's called NP-complete – that's maths lingo for a problem even mathematicians find hard to solve. To prove that the problem is NP-complete, Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers Erik Demaine, Sarah Eisenstat, and Mikhail Rudoy showed that figuring out how to solve a Rubik's cube with any number of squares on a side in the smallest number of moves will also give you a solution to another problem known to be NP-complete: the Hamiltonian path problem. That question asks whether there is route that visits each vertex exactly once in a given graph consisting of a collection of vertices connected by edges, like a triangle, pentagram, or the vast connections in a social network such as Facebook. It's reminiscent of the travelling salesperson problem, which aims to find the shortest route that visits several cities only once, probably the most famous NP-complete question of all.

Peter Bloem Knowledge Representation and Reasoning Group VU University Amsterdam De Boelelaan 1105, 1081 HV Amsterdam, NL Steven de Rooij † Mathematical Institute University of Leiden Niels Bohrweg 1, 2333 CA Leiden, NL (Dated: February 9, 2018) We present an Expectation-Maximization algorithm for the fractal inverse problem: the problem of fitting a fractal model to data. In our setting the fractals are Iterated Function Systems (IFS), with similitudes as the family of transformations. The data is a point cloud in R H with arbitrary dimensionH . Each IFS defines a probability distribution on R H, so that the fractal inverse problem can be cast as a problem of parameter estimation. We show that the algorithm reconstructs well-known fractals from data, with the model converging to high precision parameters. We also show the utility of the model as an approximation for datasources outside the IFS model class.

An instance of the n-puzzle game consists of a board holding n 2-1 distinct movable tiles, plus an empty space. The tiles are numbers from the set 1,..,n 2-1. For any such board, the empty space may be legally swapped with any tile horizontally or vertically adjacent to it. In this assignment, the blank space is going to be represented with the number 0. Given an initial state of the board, the combinatorial search problem is to find a sequence of moves that transitions this state to the goal state; that is, the configuration with all tiles arranged in ascending order 0,1,…,n 2 1. The search space is the set of all possible states reachable from the initial state.

Well this was the reaction from quite a few people to whom I showed the results. The results seem good to me. In one of my previous post, Cross-lingual word embeddings- What they are?, I explained about word embeddings. They can be used in different tasks like information retrieval, sentiment analysis and myriad others. Similarly we can embed graphs, and have methods like node2vec, latent space embeddings which can help us in representing graphs and subsequently in community detection and link prediction.