Word order evolution has been hypothesized to be constrained by a word order permutation ring: transitions involving orders that are closer in the permutation ring are more likely. The hypothesis can be seen as a particular case of Kauffman’s adjacent possible in word order evolution. Here we consider the problem of the association of the six possible orders of S, V and O to yield a couple of p...

The Heisenberg quantum mechanical conception of nature is extended and applied to the brain Strict adherence to the principle of parsimony and to quantum thinking produces naturally on the basis of an overview of brain operation compatible with the information provided by the brain sciences a uni ed description of the physical and mental aspects of nature that can account in principle for the f...

In a multi-agent system, agents must decide what to do and by what order. Autonomy is a key notion in such a system, since it is mainly the autonomy of the agents that makes the environment unpredictable and complex. From a user standpoint, autonomy is equally important as an ingredient that has to be used with parsimony: too much leads to agents fulfilling their own goals instead of those of t...

How often humans communicate with each other? What are the mechanisms that explain how human actions are distributed over time? Here we answer these questions by studying the time interval between calls and SMS messages in an anonymized, large mobile network, with 3.1 million users, over 200 million phone calls and 300 million SMS messages,spanning 70 GigaBytes. Our first contribution is the Tr...

Much of the recent countability research agrees on the idea that a satisfactory account of individuation in terms of what counts as “one” unit for counting is highly relevant for characterizing a semantics of the mass/count distinction. (What counts as “one” is not necessarily a formal atom in a Boolean algebra or a natural unit associated with natural kinds like cat.) Taking the most parsimoni...

Query-by-humming systems attempt to address the needs of the non-expert user, for whom the most natural query format – for the purposes of finding a tune, hook or melody of unknown providence – is to sing it. While human listeners are quite tolerant of error in these queries, a music retrieval mechanism must explicitly model such errors in order to perform its task. We will present a unifying v...

Myrseth and Wollbrant (2015) offer an alternative theoretical explanation for our finding that defection entails more cognitive conflict than cooperation (Kieslich & Hilbig, 2014). Although we completely agree that different theoretical explanations for a result are possible, we maintain that the theoretical approach we tested (Rand et al., 2014) is parsimonious and falsifiable, excluding certa...

Distributional evidence bearing on cospeciation of New World bats (superfamily Noctilionoidea) and associated bat flies (Diptera: Streblidae) was analyzed and revealed substantial phylogenetic structure, especially when we focused on “normal” host associations and encoded the data set hierarchically. Brooks’ parsimony analyses of bat fly occurrences among hosts recovered generally accepted sets...

We establish a log-supermodularity property for probability distributions on binary patterns observed at the tips of a tree that are generated under any 2–state Markov process. We illustrate the applicability of this result in phylogenetics by deriving an inequality relevant to estimating expected future phylogenetic diversity under a model of species extinction. In a further application of the...

The problem of tting a model composed of a number of superimposed signals to noisy observations is addressed. An approach allowing us to evaluate both the number of signals and their characteristics is presented. The idea is to search for a parsimonious representation of the data. The parsimony is insured by adding to the maximum likelihood criterion a regularization term built upon the `1-norm...