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\nHIGHLIGHTSActivity schedule results from a complex decision-making process characterized by several interrelated decisions. Different facets of an activity schedule such as activity type, timing, duration, etc. influence each other and this makes modeling activity schedules a complex task. This complexity has compelled researchers to explore different approaches for modeling activity schedules, among which two predominant approaches can be identified: the utility-maximization theory based econometric approach and the computational process modeling approach. Despite their advantages and a few successful practical applications, challenges still remain leaving avenues for exploration of new approaches. This paper contributes in this direction by reviewing the relationship between language, grammar, and machines in the context of sequence analysis for activity sequence generation. Following that, the paper presents a stochastic Finite State Machine that can generate activity sequences to match the frequency distribution of sequences from a given data set. Our results show that the proposed algorithm can not only generate activity sequences with a distribution similar to that of original data but can also efficiently generate new patterns not in the original data. Presents the language, grammar, and machine framework for use in activity sequence generationDevelops a stochastic version of sequence generator with a case study to show the details of sequence generation techniquePresents the language, grammar, and machine framework for use in activity sequence generationDevelops a stochastic version of sequence generator with a case study to show the details of sequence generation technique [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are increasingly creeping into the work sphere, thereby gradually questioning and/or disturbing the long-established moral concepts and norms communities have been using to define what makes work good. Each community, and Muslims make no exception in this regard, has to revisit their moral world to provide well-thought frameworks that can engage with the challenging ethical questions raised by the new phenomenon of AI-mediated work. For a systematic analysis of the broad topic of AI-mediated work ethics from an Islamic perspective, this article focuses on presenting an accessible overview of the "moral world" of work in the Islamic tradition. Three main components of this moral world were selected due to their relevance to the AI context, namely (1) Work is inherently good for humans, (2) Practising a religiously permitted profession and (c) Maintaining good relations with involved stakeholders. Each of these three components is addressed in a distinct section, followed by a sub-section highlighting the relevance of the respective component to the particular context of AI-mediated work. The article argues that there are no unsurmountable barriers in the Islamic tradition against the adoption of AI technologies in work sphere. However, important precautions should be considered to ensure that embracing AI will not be at the cost of work-related moral values. The article also highlights how important lessons can be learnt from the positive historical experience of automata that thrived in the Islamic civilization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Preserved in the Castle Museum at Sondershausen in central Germany is a bronze taking the form of a rotund, kneeling man. The object, nearly 22.5 inches tall and cast in a single piece, is known today as the 'Püsterich'. Since its archaeological discovery in the 1540s, it has proven to be a subject of intellectual debate: numerous authors have sought to understand either its iconography or, on the basis of its hollow shape and the two openings in its head, its function. The resulting studies have been surprisingly varied in their claims. With a method of approach rooted in 'object studies', this article explores both of the aforementioned aspects as well as form-function relations. Starting with a basic art-historical analysis of the bronze—thus far lacking in the scholarship—the article recognizes the work as having been produced in Hildesheim between c. 1220 and 1250, a context in which it can be related closely to the philosophical concerns of the prominent theologian Albertus Magnus. In its function as a 'sufflator' (hearth-blower) and its depiction of a 'pygmeus', the 'Püsterich', along with seven other related figures, can be understood as a 'Wissensobjekt', an object or bearer of knowledge. With and through them, viewers/users negotiated complex problems about the nature of living beings; specifically, the bronze thematized the question of what distinguished human beings from animals: in Albertus's thought, the mastering of science and art. This new understanding of the 'Püsterich' allows us to recognize its special position at the origins of 'philosophical anthropology' and the history of science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The covered cup, discovered in 1981 during the salvage excavation of a burial mound in southern Ukraine, is an impressive example of secular metalwork from around 1200. The cup's interior contains a cast silvergilt lion and a hitherto undetected siphon mechanism, making it one of the first preserved automata from Europe and the earliest known Western medieval example of this type of trick vessel. The cup from the Chungul Kurgan helps to clarify the probable operation of the chantepleure illustrated in the sketchbook of Villard de Honnecourt and sheds light on possible other medieval automata. The cup's presence in the same burial with other works from the same approximate date and region suggests historical circumstances that might have resulted in its burial with a nomadic leader in the steppe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We demonstrate how to evaluate stepwise hedge automata (Shas) with subhedge projection while completely projecting irrelevant subhedges. Since this requires passing finite state information top-down, we introduce the notion of downward stepwise hedge automata. We use them to define in-memory and streaming evaluators with complete subhedge projection for Shas. We then tune the evaluators so that they can decide on membership at the earliest time point. We apply our algorithms to the problem of answering regular XPath queries on Xml streams. Our experiments show that complete subhedge projection of Shas can indeed speed up earliest query answering on Xml streams so that it becomes competitive with the best existing streaming tools for XPath queries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the timeline-based approach to planning, the evolution over time of a set of state variables (the timelines) is governed by a set of temporal constraints. Traditional timeline-based planning systems excel at the integration of planning with execution by handling temporal uncertainty. In order to handle general nondeterminism as well, the concept of timeline-based games has been recently introduced. It has been proved that finding whether a winning strategy exists for such games is 2EXPTIME-complete. However, a concrete approach to synthesize controllers implementing such strategies is missing. This article fills the gap by providing an effective and computationally optimal approach to controller synthesis for timeline-based games. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we study large classes of nonlinear systems that admit a transfer function completely described by their input-output behavior. Our objective is to identify and analyze the aforementioned classes, which exhibit unique characteristics related to separable systems. We aim to fit certain examples of automata/dynamical systems with new concepts. We observe that for a Discrete System or Automaton, the state set forms a group. Furthermore, there exists a natural near-ring for Separable Systems. Some substructures of this near-ring are generated by id. and a map from state set Q to itself if the state set Q is an abelian structure. It is interesting to note that Separable Systems themselves form a nearring with respect to parallel and series connections. We discuss certain results and provide examples to validate separable systems and the outcomes. This paper offers a theoretical and practical overview of dynamical systems in our daily lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we show that automata theory is also a suitable tool for analyzing a more complex type of the k-forcing process. First, the definition of k-forcing automata is presented according to the definition of k-forcing for graphs. Moreover, we study and discuss the language of k-forcing automata for particular graphs. Also, for some graphs with different k-forcing sets, we study the languages of their k-forcing automata. In addition, for some given recognizable languages, we study the structure of graphs. After that, we show that k-forcing automata arising from isomorph graphs are also isomorph. Also, we present the style of words that can be recognized with k-forcing automata. Moreover, we introduce the structure of graphs the k-forcing automata arising from which recognize some particular languages. To clarify the notions and the results obtained in this study, some examples are submitted as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Runtime Enforcement (RE) is a technique aimed at monitoring the executions of a system at runtime and ensure its compliance against a set of formal requirements (properties). RE employs an enforcer (a safety wrapper for the system) which modifies the (untrustworthy) output by performing actions such as delaying (by storing/buffering) and suppressing events, when needed. In this paper, to handle practical applications with memory constraints, we propose a new RE paradigm where the memory of the enforcer is bounded/finite. Besides the property to be enforced, the user specifies a bound on the enforcer memory. Bounding the memory poses various challenges such as how to handle the situation when the memory is full, how to optimally discard events from the buffer to accommodate new events and let the enforcer continue operating. We define the bounded-memory RE problem and develop a framework for any regular property. All of our results are formalized and proved. We also analyze probabilistically how much memory is required on an average case for a given regular property, such that the output of the bounded enforcer is equal to that of the unbounded enforcer up to a fixed probability. The proposed framework is implemented and a case study is worked out to show the practicability and usefulness of the bounded enforcer in the real-world and to show the usage of the aforementioned probabilistic analysis on them. The performance is evaluated via some examples from application scenarios and it indicates linear changes in the execution time of the enforcers in response to increases in trace length, property complexity, and buffer sizes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the article, we aim to understand the responses of living organisms, exemplified by mycelium, to external stimuli through the lens of a Turing machine with an oracle (oTM). To facilitate our exploration, we show that a variant of an oTM is a cellular automaton with an oracle, which aptly captures the intricate behaviours observed in organisms such as fungi, shedding light on their dynamic interactions with their environment. This interaction reveals forms of reflection that can be interpreted as a minimum volume of consciousness. Thus, in our study, we interpret consciousness as a mathematical phenomenon when an arithmetic function is arbitrarily modified. We call these modifications the hybridization of behaviour. oTMs are the mathematical language of this hybridization.

We consider the problem of extracting a deterministic finite automaton (DFA) from a trained recurrent neural network (RNN). We present a novel algorithm that uses exact learning and abstract interpretation to perform efficient extraction of a minimal DFA describing the state dynamics of a given RNN. We use Angluin's L ∗ algorithm as a learner and the given RNN as an oracle, refining the abstraction of the RNN only as much as necessary for answering equivalence queries. Our technique allows DFA-extraction from the RNN while avoiding state explosion, even when the state vectors are large and fine differentiation is required between RNN states. We experiment on multi-layer GRUs and LSTMs with state-vector dimensions, alphabet sizes, and underlying DFA which are significantly larger than in previous DFA-extraction work. Aditionally, we discuss when it may be relevant to apply the technique to RNNs trained as language models rather than binary classifiers, and present experiments on some such examples. In some of our experiments, the underlying target language can be described with a succinct DFA, yet we find that the extracted DFA is large and complex. These are cases in which the RNN has failed to learn the intended generalisation, and our extraction procedure highlights words which are misclassified by the seemingly "perfect" RNN. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the principles of compositional verification, verifying that lower-level components satisfy their specification ensures that the whole system satisfies its top-level specification. The key step is to ensure that the lower-level specifications constitute a correct decomposition of the top-level specification. In a non-stochastic context, such decomposition can be analyzed using techniques of theorem proving. In industrial applications, especially in safety-critical systems, specifications are often of stochastic nature, for example, giving a bound on the probability that a system failure will occur before a given time. A decomposition of such a specification requires techniques beyond traditional theorem proving. The first contribution of the paper is a theoretical framework that allows the representation of, and reasoning about, stochastic and timed behavior of systems as well as specifications for such behavior. The framework is based on traces that describe the continuous-time evolution of a system, and specifications are formulated using timed automata combined with probabilistic acceptance conditions. The second contribution is a novel approach to verifying decompositions of such specifications by reducing the problem to checking emptiness of the solution space for a system of linear inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BackgroundHistorically, although researchers in the science of complex systems proposed the idea of the edge of chaos and/or self-organized criticality as the essential feature of complex organization, they were not able to generalize this concept. Complex organization is regarded at the edge of chaos between the order phase and the chaos phase and a very rare case. Additionally, in cellular automata, the critical property is class IV, which is also rarely found. Therefore, there can be overestimation for natural selection. More recently, developments in cognitive and brain science have led to the free energy principle based on Bayesian inference, while quantum cognition has been established to explain various cognitive phenomena. Since Bayesian inference results in the perspective of a steady state, it can be described in Boolean logic. Considering that quantum logic consists of multiple Boolean logic in terms of lattice theory, the perspective of the free energy principle is the perspective of order, and the perspective of quantum logic might be the perspective of multiple worlds, which is strongly relevant for the edge of chaos.ProblemThe next question arises whether the perspective derived from quantum logic can be generalized for the complex behavior consisting of both order and chaos, instead of the edge of chaos or self-organized criticality, to reveal the property of critical behavior such as a power-law distribution.SolutionIn this study, we define quantum logic automata, which entail quantum logic (orthomodular lattice) in terms of lattice theory and have the features of a dynamical system. Because quantum logic automata are applied to a binary sequence, one can estimate the behavior of those automata with respect to patterns and a time series. Here, we show that most of a group of quantum logic automata display class IV-like behavior, in which oscillatory traveling waves collide with each other, leading to complex behavior; moreover, a time series of binary sequences displays 1/f noise. Therefore, one can see that quantum logic automata generalize and expand the idea of the edge of chaos.

Abstract Intelligent Transport System (ITS) is a typical class of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), and due to the special characteristics of such systems, higher requirements are placed on system security. Runtime verification is a lightweight verification technique which is used to improve the security of such systems. However, current runtime verification methods often ignore the effects of the physical environment (e.g., the effects of rain, snow, and other weather changes on road conditions), which results in the inability of the monitor to effectively monitor the system according to the changes in the environment. To address this problem, this paper proposes a method for constructing a runtime monitor with environmental context-awareness capability. First, the physical environment factors affecting the system are formally described and constructed into an environment model, then the system statute is transformed into a Büchi automaton, and then a synthesis algorithm combining the environment model and the Büchi automaton is designed based on the network of automatons, and the corresponding monitor is generated. Finally, the proposed method is applied and verified on simulation and real objects. The experimental results show that the monitors generated based on the method of this paper can effectively monitor unsafe events in different environments, thus improving the safety of intelligent driving systems.

This study aims to investigate the algebraic properties of fuzzy multiset finite automaton (FMFA), giving a congruence relation. Using the equivalence classes, a minimal accessible complete FMFA is then presented. In addition, we define the concepts of admissible relation, admissible partition for FMFA and quotient FMFA. Further, we present an algorithm which determines an admissible partition for an FMFA and we suggest the time complexity of the algorithm. In particular, we introduce a connection between the admissible partition and the quotient FMFA and we show that any quotient of a given FMFA and the FMFA itself have the same language. Furthermore, using the quotient FMFA, we obtain an irreducible FMFA with the same language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intelligent Transport System (ITS) is a typical class of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), and due to the special characteristics of such systems, higher requirements are placed on system security. Runtime verification is a lightweight verification technique which is used to improve the security of such systems. However, current runtime verification methods often ignore the effects of the physical environment (e.g., the effects of rain, snow, and other weather changes on road conditions), which results in the inability of the monitor to effectively monitor the system according to the changes in the environment. To address this problem, this paper proposes a method for constructing a runtime monitor with environmental context-awareness capability. First, the physical environment factors affecting the system are formally described and constructed into an environment model, then the system statute is transformed into a Büchi automaton, and then a synthesis algorithm combining the environment model and the Büchi automaton is designed based on the network of automatons, and the corresponding monitor is generated. Finally, the proposed method is applied and verified on simulation and real objects. The experimental results show that the monitors generated based on the method of this paper can effectively monitor unsafe events in different environments, thus improving the safety of intelligent driving systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background and Objectives: Quantum-dot Cellular Automata technology is a new method for digital circuits and systems designs. This method can be attractive for researchers due to its special features such as power consumption, high calculation speed and small dimensions. Methods: This paper tries to design a three-bits counter with minimum area and delay among the other circuits. As the circuit dimensions are reduced, the area and consequently, the delay are decreased, too. Therefore, this paper tries to design a three-bits counter with minimum dimensions and delay. The proposed counter contains 96 cells and is designed in three layers. It has the least area and delay compared to the priors. Results: The circuit simulation illustrates 0.08 µm2 of area occupation and one clock cycle delay. In comparison with the best previous design, which includes 110 cells, the cells number, area and delay are decreased by 12.72%, 27.27% and 33.33%, respectively. Also, the cost of the circuit has been improved by 54.32%. The power analysis of the design shows 13% reduction in the total energy dissipation of the circuit compared to the best prior work. The circuit reliability versus temperature variations has been simulated and the results represent suitable stability. The fault tolerance of the circuit which is occurred by the displacement faults represents normal operation of the circuit. Conclusion: As the counter is an element which is implemented in several digital systems, its area reduction causes the whole system area to be reduced. Also, the circuit delay has been decreased significantly which means that the circuit can be employed by high speed systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I propose a version of quantum mechanics featuring a discrete and finite number of states that is plausibly a model of the real world. The model is based on standard unitary quantum theory of a closed system with a finite-dimensional Hilbert space. Given certain simple conditions on the spectrum of the Hamiltonian, Schrödinger evolution is periodic, and it is straightforward to replace continuous time with a discrete version, with the result that the system only visits a discrete and finite set of state vectors. The biggest challenges to the viability of such a model come from cosmological considerations. The theory may have implications for questions of mathematical realism and finitism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We demonstrate how to evaluate stepwise hedge automata (Shas) with subhedge projection while completely projecting irrelevant subhedges. Since this requires passing finite state information top-down, we introduce the notion of downward stepwise hedge automata. We use them to define in-memory and streaming evaluators with complete subhedge projection for Shas. We then tune the evaluators so that they can decide on membership at the earliest time point. We apply our algorithms to the problem of answering regular XPath queries on Xml streams. Our experiments show that complete subhedge projection of Shas can indeed speed up earliest query answering on Xml streams so that it becomes competitive with the best existing streaming tools for XPath queries.

Interval-valued neutrosophic sets have been shown to provide a limited platform for computational complexity, but neutrosophic sets are suitable for it. The neutrosophic sets are a suitable mechanism for interpreting the philosophical problems of real-life, but not for scientific problems because it is difficult to consolidate. This study aims to develop the notion of neutrosophic single-valued general machine over a finite group, which is knows as ”group neutrosophic general machine”, for simplicity, GNGM. After that, we present the notions of max-min GNGM, single-valued neutrosophic subgroup (SVNSG) and single-valued neutrosophic normal sub group (SVNNSG).

Over the course of the long fifteenth century, scholars and books moved across regions and spurred transcreations of numerous Islamicate manuscripts in South Asia. This essay undertakes a close reading of an early sixteenth-century Persian transcreation—that is, a translation in both form and content—of a twelfth-century Arabic compendium on mechanical devices. I examine what the historical event of translation in the South Asian region of Malwa and town of Mandu meant as it is read amidst cultural flows between Mamluk Egypt, Yemen, Mecca, and Hindustan. By analyzing the colophons of early Arabic copies of al-Jazari's Compendium of Theory and Useful Practice for the Fabrication of Machines along with Da'ud Shadiyabadi's Wonders of Mechanics in Persian, this study demonstrates how Shadiyabadi's translation distances itself from al-Jazari's book. As Shadiyabadi's Wonders of Mechanics becomes the standard Persian translation of al-Jazari—appearing in subsequent Mughal and Iranian copies—the work of a scholar from a small North-Central Indian court links scholars, sultanates, and regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most time‐consuming task for teachers is creating and correcting exercises to evaluate students. This is normally performed by hand, which incurs high time costs and is error‐prone. A way to alleviate this problem is to provide an assistant tool that automates such tasks. In the case of exercises based on diagrams, they can be represented as models to enable their automated model‐based generation for any target environment, like web or mobile applications, or learning platforms like Moodle. In this paper, we propose an automated process for synthesizing five types of diagram‐based exercises for the Moodle platform. Being model‐based, our solution is domain‐agnostic (i.e., it can be applied to arbitrary domains like automata, electronics, or software design). We report on its use within a university course on automata theory, as well as evaluations of generality, effectiveness and efficiency, illustrating the benefits of our approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we propose a variation of the concept of "anthropological machine" by Giorgio Agamben in which tensions do not occur between humans and animals, but between humans and automatons. To illustrate this, we analyse the representation of automatons in early Spanish cinema: El teatro eléctrico de Bob (Chomón, 1909), Muñecos (Perojo, 1916) and Sanz y el secreto de su arte (Thous and Sanz, 1918). We extend our comment to international productions and subsequent representations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is often assumed that in the collapse of the Aristotelian distinction between art and nature that results from the rise of mechanical philosophies in the early modern period, the collapse falls on the side of art. That is, all of the diversity among natures that was explained previously as differences among substantial forms came to be seen simply as differences in arrangements of matter according to laws instituted by the "divine artificer", God. This paper argues that, for René Descartes, the collapse occurs on both sides. Natures are artefacts of God, and human artefacts, under some conditions, can be classified as natures or, at least, continuous within nature. Drawing on developments across both horticulture and engineering in the 16th and 17th centuries, as well as Descartes' mechanical philosophy, this paper explores challenges to the Aristotelian nature/art distinction. The question then is what, in the advent of this collapse, are human artificers doing when they construct artefacts? Are they replicating God's powers by creating new natures, or are they doing something else, and if so, what might that be? It is argued that we should view human invention for Descartes not as creating new natures so much as discovering them. These findings have consequences for how we interpret Descartes' use of the term "nature" in relation to automata and other artefacts produced by human hands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For a writer so disparaging about magic, Chaucer's understanding of occult practice seems to have been considerable. In the Squire's Tale, magic objects drive the (truncated) plot. For the Canon's Yeoman's Tale, Chaucer consulted alchemical works to construct his story. And in the Franklin's Tale, Chaucer's vivid depictions of illusions reflect his broad knowledge of magical practice. These tales include learned references to alchemy, astral prayer, astrology (regarded, to some extent, as a science in Chaucer's day), automata, and clerical magic, as are explored here. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work addresses the problem of quantifying opacity for discrete event systems. We consider a passive intruder who knows the overall structure of a system but has limited observational capabilities and tries to infer the secret of this system based on the captured information flow. Researchers have developed various approaches to quantify opacity to compensate for the lack of precision of qualitative opacity in describing the degree of security of a system. Most existing works on quantifying opacity study specified probabilistic problems in the framework of probabilistic systems, where the behaviors or states of a system are classified as secret or non-secret. In this work, we quantify opacity by a state-worth function, which associates each state of a system with the worth it carries. To this end, we present a novel category of opacity, called worthy opacity, characterizing whether the worth of information exposed to the outside world during the system's evolution is below a threshold. We first provide an online approach for verifying worthy opacity using the notion of a run matrix proposed in this research. Then, we investigate a class of systems satisfying the so-called 1-cycle returned property and present a worthy opacity verification algorithm for this class. Finally, an example in the context of smart buildings is provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Magnetic quantum-dot cellular automata (MQCA) is a recent technology in computation based on closely coupled ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic dots; it is favorable as the fabrication issues arise day by day at the nanometer scale in CMOS technology. In this letter, first, we propose an MQCA-based 2:1 Multiplexer (Mux) using conventional horizontal and vertical approaches. In the next step, we propose a novel area efficient compact design approach with the help of the explicit interaction, coupling concept, and dominant nature of slant edge nanomagnets. The proposed compact design methodology leads to ~71%–97% reduction in the total number of nanodots and ~22%–99% reduction in area occupancy compared to the horizontal, vertical, nanomagnetic QCA, and existing QCA-based 2:1 Mux. To showcase the scalability of our proposed structure, we also implement an 8:1 Mux. The design layouts and simulation results are verified using the MuMax3 micromagnetic simulator. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]