Motivation plays a key role in the learning process. This paper describes an experience in the context of undergraduate teaching of Artificial Intelligence at the Computer Science Department of the Faculty of Sciences in the University of Porto. A sophisticated competition framework, which involved Prolog programmed contenders and game servers, including an appealing GUI, was developed to motiv...

This report will be comparing and criticising different approaches of incorporating competition and cooperation within an environment to combat a lack of intrinsic motivation. While there have been many studies conducted on the effectiveness of competition and cooperation on motivation and other factors, there is still much debate on which methods are the best. I will be looking at six differen...

In this paper, we consider the design of large-scale multiple allocation hub-and-spoke transportation networks in a competitive environment. We adopt a generic hub arc location model that locates arcs with discounted transport costs connecting pairs of hub facilities. Two firms compete for customers in a Stackelberg framework where the leader firm locates hub arcs to maximize its revenue, given...

Since its inception, the Medicare Program has allowed for the participation of private health plans, but the relationship of private plans to the government-sponsored fee-for-service (FFS) plan has been the subject of debate. Increased payments to private plans, the introduction of regional preferred provider organizations (PPOs), and a mandated demonstration of price competition that includes ...

A new decentralized robust controller for Load Frequency Control (LFC) in a deregulated electricity environment is presented in this paper. It is shown that subject to a condition based on the H∞ norm and structured singular values (μ ), each local area controller can be designed independently such that stability of the overall closed loop system is guaranteed. A generalized model for LFC schem...

the first and most important principle of marketing is focusing on the customer needs and wants, because regardless of that, companies will not be able to survive in today's competitive environment. these days, companies know that providing products and services according to customer needs and demands, is an important competitive advantage to gain more sales and benefit, so identifying cus...

This paper examines how strategic posture in IT investment with respect to industry peers (i.e., level of IT investment compared to the industry norm for IT investments) and competitive environment influence IT investments of a firm. We synthesize prior literature on determinants of IT investments and competitive dynamics to develop our theoretical framework. Using archival data for about 380 f...

This paper proposes a new location problem of competitive facilities, e.g. shops and stores, with uncertain demands in the plane. By representing the demands for facilities as random variables, the location problem is formulated to a stochastic programming problem, and for finding its solution, three deterministic programming problems: expectation maximizing problem, probability maximizing prob...

BACKGROUND Most gene-environment interaction (GXE) research, though based on clear, vulnerability-oriented hypotheses, is carried out using exploratory rather than hypothesis-informed statistical tests, limiting power and making formal evaluation of competing GXE propositions difficult. METHOD We present and illustrate a new regression technique which affords direct testing of theory-derived ...

We introduce dTank, a competitive environment, as useful for architectural comparisons of competitive agents and comparisons of human and agent behavior. dTank, a Java-based simulation, was designed to facilitate these forms of holistic comparison of emergent behavior. We present several models built using several cognitive and agent architectures (Java, Jess, and Soar), and compare them agains...