65 research outputs found
Norms and accountability in multi-agent societies
No full textIt is argued that norms are best understood as classes of constraints on practical reasoning,
which an agent may consult either to select appropriate goals or commitments according to
the circumstances, or to construct a discursive justification for a course of action after the event.
We also discuss the question of how norm-conformance can be enforced in an open agent society,
arguing that some form of peer pressure is needed in open agent societies lacking
universally-recognised rules or any accepted authority structure. The paper includes formal
specifications of some data structures that may be employed in reasoning about normative agents
On acid drops and teardrops:observer issues in computational creativity
No full textWe argue that the notion of creativity in a person or software is a secondary and essentially contested concept. Hence, in Computational Creativity research - where we aim to build software taken seriously as independently creative - understanding the roles people take as process observer and product consumer is paramount. Depending on the domain, there can be a natural bias against software created artefacts, and Computational Creativity researchers have exacerbated this situation through Turing-style comparison tests. Framing this as a modified Chinese Room experiment, We propose two remedies to the situation. These involve software accounting for its decisions, actions and products, and taking the radical step of thinking of computer generated artefacts as fundamentally different to their human-produced counterparts. We use two case studies, where people interact with an automated painter and with computer-generated videogames, to highlight the observer issues we raise, and to demonstrate partial implementations of our remedies
A Reformation of Rule 2 of Centering Theory
No full text The standard preference ordering on the well-known centering transitions Continue, Retain, Shift is argued to be unmotivated: a partial, context-dependent ordering emerges from the interaction between principles dubbed cohesion (maintaining the same center of attention) and salience (realizing the center of attention as the most prominent NP). A new formulation of Rule 2 of centering theory is proposed that incorporates these principles as well as a streamlined version of Strube and Hahn's (1999) notion of cheapness. It is argued that this formulation provides a natural way to handle “topic switches” that appear to violate the canonical preference ordering. </jats:p
Speech Acts, commitment and multi-agent communication
No full textThe principle aim of this paper is to reconsider the suitability of Austin and Searle’s Speech Act theory as a basis for agent communication languages. Two distinct computational interpretations of speech acts are considered: the standard “mentalistic” approach associated with the work of Cohen and Levesque which involves attributing beliefs and intentions to artificial agents, and the “social semantics” approach originating (in the context of MAS) with Singh which aims to model commitments that agents undertake as a consequence of communicative actions. Modifications and extensions are proposed to current commitment-based analyses, drawing on recent philosophical studies by Brandom, Habermas and Heath. A case is made for adopting Brandom’s framework of normative pragmatics, modelling dialogue states as deontic scoreboards which keep track of commitments and entitlements that speakers acknowledge and hearers attribute to other interlocutors. The paper concludes by outlining an update semantics and protocol for selected locutions
Towards a Dynamic Logic of Gradual Normativity and Norm Adherence
No full textNorms and accountability in multi-agent societies Authors: Kibble, Rodger Norms and plans as unification criteria for social collective
Kibble-Zurek exponent and chiral transition of the period-4 phase of Rydberg chains
No full textChains of Rydberg atoms have emerged as an amazing playground to study quantum physics in 1D. Playing with inter-atomic distances and laser detuning, one can in particular explore the commensurate-incommensurate transition out of density waves through the Kibble-Zurek mechanism, and the possible presence of a chiral transition with dynamical exponent z > 1. Here, we address this problem theoretically with effective blockade models where the short-distance repulsions are replaced by a constraint of no double occupancy. For the period-4 phase, we show that there is an Ashkin-Teller transition point with exponent ν = 0.78 surrounded by a direct chiral transition with a dynamical exponent z = 1.11 and a Kibble-Zurek exponent μ = 0.41. For Rydberg atoms with a van der Waals potential, we suggest that the experimental value μ = 0.25 is due to a chiral transition with z ≃ 1.9 and ν ≃ 0.47 surrounding an Ashkin-Teller transition close to the 4-state Potts universality.QN/Chepiga La
Discourse as practice: from Bourdieu to Brandom
No full textThis paper investigates Robert Brandom’s programme of logical expressivism and in the process attempts to clarify his use of the term practice, by means of a detailed comparison with the works of sociologist and anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu. It turns out that the two scholars have a number of concerns in common, including the means by which core practices can be amalgamated into more sophisticated ones, and the possibility of explicating practices with- out distorting them or generating incoherent codifications. We find some congruences between the two approaches but also a number of divergences. In particular, Bourdieu deprecates the well-known dis- tinctions between langue and parole (Saussure), and competence and performance (Chomsky), while (we argue) Brandom ends up instituting his own “competence” model. We conclude by questioning how far this is compatible with his avowed aim of developing an “analytic pragmatism”
Reasoning, representation and social practice
No full textThe idea that human cognition essentially involves symbolic reasoning and the manipulation of representations which somehow stand for entities in the real world is central to “cognitivist” approaches to AI and cognitive science, but has been repeatedly challenged within these disciplines; while the very idea of representation has been problematised by philosophers such as Dreyfus, Davidson, McDowell and Rorty. This extended abstract discusses Robert Brandom’s thesis that the representational function of language is a derivative outcome of social practices rather than a primary factor in mentation and communication, and raises some questions about the computational implications of his approach
- …
