The article puts forward a branching-style framework for the analysis of determinism and indeterminism of scientific theories, starting from the core idea that an indeterministic system is one whose present allows for more than one alternative possible future. We describe how a definition of determinism stated in terms of branching models supplements and improves current treatments of determini...

The notion of deterministic execution of concurrent systems has appeared in many guises throughout Edward A. Lee’s œuvre, but few really grasp how powerful, important, subtle, and flexible the concept really is. Determinism can be thought of as an abstraction boundary that delineates where control is passed from a system designer to the implementation. This paper surveys some of the many forms ...

A determinism test is proposed based on the well-known method of the surrogate data. Assuming predictability to be a signature of determinism, the proposed method checks for intracycle (e.g., short-term) determinism in the pseudoperiodic time series for which standard methods of surrogate analysis do not apply. The approach presented is composed of two steps. First, the data are preprocessed to...

The dynamical origin of complex networks, i.e., the underlying principles governing network evolution, is a crucial issue in network study. In this paper, by carrying out analysis to the temporal data of Flickr and Epinions-two typical social media networks, we found that the dynamical pattern in neighborhood, especially the formation of triadic links, plays a dominant role in the evolution of ...

The challenge for our panel was to address the opportunities and challenges of synthetic task environments for basic research on human performance in sociotechnical systems. In doing this, the classical three-body problem from physics is used as a metaphor to illustrate the contrast between dyadic and triadic semiotic models of cognitive systems. In the context of this metaphor, synthetic task ...

Non-Gaussian multivariate probability distributions, derived from climate and geofluid statistics, allow for nonlinear correlations between linearly uncorrelated components, due to joint Shannon negentropies. Triadic statistical dependence under pair-wise (total or partial) independence is thus possible. Synergy or interaction information among triads is estimated. We formulate an optimization ...

This paper develops a triadic design for conducting trust and reciprocity experiments. A large literature on single-game trust and reciprocity experiments is based on the assumption that subjects’ utility payoffs are the same as their own monetary payoffs in the experiments. Such designs test compound hypotheses that include the hypothesis that other-regarding preferences do not affect behavior...

This paper takes a critical look at the benefits provided by state-of-the-art deterministic execution techniques. Specifically, we look at four applications of deterministic execution: debugging, fault-tolerant replication, testing, and security. For each application, we discuss what an ideal system would provide, and then look at how deterministic systems compare to the ideal. Further, we disc...

In standard computation, non-determinism is used for specifying programs’ behaviour, without having to specify details of implementation. In quantum computation, non-determinism is either meant to be “classical” probabilism or it is not considered at all, since quantum computation is the physical theory of computation and thus it does not deal with non-implementable features. In this work we wi...