The Philosophers' Process is a Markovian version of the famous Dining Philosophers Problem introduced by Dijkstra as a model for resource sharing. It can be viewed as a reversible interacting particle system. This paper deals with the problem of computing its reversible measure in the case of a large but nite number of sites. This equilibrium measure is a Markov eld on the underlying graph of i...

Artificial life (ALife) is the attempt to create artificial instances of life in a variety of media, but primarily within the digital computer. As such, the field brings together computationally-minded biologists and biologically-minded computer scientists. I argue that this new field is filled with interesting philosophical issues. However, there is a dearth of philosophers actively conducting...

Adaptation of a component-based system can be achieved in the coordination modelling language Paradigm through the special component McPal. McPal regulates the propagation of new behaviour and guides the changes in the components and in their coordination. Here we show how McPal may delegate part of its control to local adaptation managers, created on-the-fly, allowing for distribution of the a...

Because of the immensity of Augustine’s corpus and the complex intellectual patrimony that informs it, attempts to place him within the history of philosophical traditions are often partial and in need of supplementation. In treating below of Augustine’s engagement with Aristotelianism, Middle Platonism, Neoplatonism, and Stoicism, I shall be drawing attention to particular topics, lexical poin...

This paper deals with the 2-Peripatetic Salesman Problem for the case where costs respect the triangle inequality. The aim is to determine 2 edge disjoint Hamiltonian cycles of minimum total cost on a graph. We first present a straightforward 9/4 approximation algorithm based on the well known Christofides algorithm for the travelling salesman problem. Then we propose a 2(n−1)/n-approximation p...

These notes are based on lectures in algebraic topology taught by Peter May and Henry Chan at the 2016 University of Chicago Math REU. They are loosely chronological, having been reorganized for my benefit and significantly annotated by my personal exposition, plus solutions to in-class/HW exercises, plus content from readings (from May’s Finite Book), books (e.g. May’s Concise Course, Munkres’...