In the physics of the natural world, basic tasks of life, such as homeostasis and reproduction, are extremely complex operations, requiring the coordination of billions of atoms even in simple cases. By contrast, artificial living organisms can be implemented in computers using relatively few bits, and copying a data structure is trivial. Of course, the physical overheads of the computers thems...

The Belgian mathematician Quetelet (1835) in his treatise on human development wrote ‘Man is born, grows up and dies according to laws which have never been properly investigated either as a whole or in the mode of their mutual reactions’, thereby reinforcing our awareness that ageing is an inevitable and natural process in life but that this process is not well-understood. Quetelet (1 835) mad...

We briefly discuss the history of the prime number theorem and summarize Newman’s 1980 proof using complex analysis. I have attempted to convey the flavor of the proof without deviating too much from heuristic arguments; all details are left as exercises to the reader. “There are two facts about the distribution of prime numbers of which I hope to convince you so overwhelmingly that they will b...

In the context of natural deduction for propositional classical logic, with classicality given by the inference rule reductio ad absurdum, we investigate the De Morgan translation of disjunction in terms of negation and conjunction. Once the translation is extended to proofs, it obtains a reduction of provability to provability in the disjunction-free subsystem. It is natural to ask whether a r...

The purpose of this essay is to establish the validity of the following four propositions. 1. The assumption that symbolic logic is valid a priori is false, as are the corollaries implicit in this assumption, namely, that symbolic logic is the one and only logic; that it is the logic of effective practical reasoning and action; and, that it is the logic that governs natural language. 2. Typolog...

There has been an increase in the occurrence of natural disasters and their impact has aroused the interest of many stakeholders to incorporate different strategies on disaster management. Although, disaster ceased many opportunities and lives, the lives of survivors do not cease in the disaster affected areas. This bespeaks the need to develop communities to cope up with challenges during post...

Information can be expressed in many ways according to the different capacities of humans to perceive it. Current systems deals with multimedia, multiformat and multiplatform systems but another « multi » is still pending to guarantee global access to information, that is, multilinguality. Different languages imply different replications of the systems according to the language in question. No ...

Pedestrians, bicyclists, car drivers, boat and airplane pilots, as well as other cognitive agents participating in public traffic must respect rules in order to avoid dangerous situations and to ensure a smooth flow of traffic. The SailAway project [1] investigates traffic and related navigational rules from a formal and computational point of view. The aim is to enable artificial cognitive age...

We have built up an open-ended computerized overview which can give instant access to information because controlled languages (CLs) are of undoubted interest (for safety and economic reasons, etc.) for industry and those willing to create a CL need to be aware of what has already been done. To achieve it, we had a close look at what has been written in the field of CLs and tried to get in touc...

Websites of businesses should accommodate both customer needs and business requirements. Traditional menu-driven navigation and key word search do not allow users to describe their intentions precisely. We have developed a conversational interface to online shopping that provides convenient, personalized access to information using natural language dialog. User studies show significantly reduce...