To operate intelligently in the world, an agent must reason about the consequences of its ac­ tions. The consequences of an action are a func­ tion of both the state of the world and of the action itself. In realistic domains we cannot ex­ pect to have complete information, so a repre­ sentation for reasoning about actions must be able to express uncertainty concerning the state of the world an...

The weather report says that the chance of a hurricane arriving later today is 90%. Forewarned is forearmed: expecting a hurricane, before leaving home you pack your hurricane lantern. Probability enters into this scenario twice, first in the form of a physical probability, sometimes called a chance, quantifying certain aspects of the local weather that make a hurricane very likely, and second ...

rijksuniversiteit groningen knowledge, chance, and change proefschrift ter verkrijging van het doctoraat in de Wiskunde en Natuurwetenschappen aan de Rijksuniversiteit Groningen op gezag van de Rector Magnificus, dr. F. Zwarts, in het openbaar te verdedigen op vrijdag  september  om . uur door Barteld Pieter Kooi geboren op  augustus  te Groningen

Background Endometriosis has been widely implicated as one of the causes of chronic pelvic pain, dysmenorrhea and infertility. The purpose of our study was to define the presumed correlation between visual and histologic diagnostic features of endometriosis based on the peritoneal findings identified in laparoscopy as a diagnostic trial with a standardized technique. So, all the specimens inclu...

An aura of mystery has always surrounded the subject of sudden unexpected death. Part of the explanation is an absence of a single or unusual explanation, although electrical instability of the heart does serve as a unifying concept for the final common pathway. In this review, emphasis is placed on the random aggregation of a wide variety of contributing factors in the pathogenesis of sudden d...

The most familiar philosophical conception of objective chance renders determinism incompatible with non-trivial chances. This conception – associated in particular with the work of David Lewis – is not a good fit with our use of the word ‘chance’ and its cognates in ordinary discourse. In this paper we show how a generalized framework for chance can reconcile determinism with non-trivial chanc...