This is an excerpt from Hamilton Jordan's book No Such Thing as a Bad Day reprinted with permission.

READERS OF PLATO’S dialogues would recognize a constantly renewed desire to define philosophy and to distinguish it from sophistry, rhetoric, poetry, etc. One suspects that this attempt to delimit philosophy as a discourse is itself what philosophizing is. In Plato, reflexivity is already inscribed into the nature of philosophical activity. The Phaedo and the Phaedrus are two of Plato’s dialogu...

There are presently many and seemingly different optimization algorithms, based on unrelated paradigms. Herein we propose a framework to encompass those heuristics, providing a common working structure and a basis for their comparison. A formal de nition, based on the multiset formalism is presented. We also show how to express some common operators in our framework and we present some (partial...