Executive summary: This document provides proposals with regard to two fundamental issues which will determine the success or failure of the Convention’s ability to set an acceptable human and environmental standard for the breaking of the world fleet. It is imperative that this Convention at a minimum puts a halt to the crudest and most unacceptable shipbreaking method and the externalization ...

Members of a multi-robot team, operating within close quarters, need to avoid crashing into each other. Simple collision avoidance methods can be used to prevent such collisions, typically by computing the distance to other robots and stopping, perhaps moving away, when this distance falls below a fixed threshold. While a simple method like this may skirt disaster, the results may be inefficien...

We present a family of submodular valuation classes that generalizes gross substitute. We show that Walrasian equilibrium always exist for one class in this family, and there is a natural ascending auction which finds it. We prove some new structural properties on gross-substitute auctions which, in turn, show that the known ascending auctions for this class (Gul-Stacchetti and Ausbel) are, in ...

We identify a number of theories of strength that of Π 1 CA0. In particular: (a) the theory that the set of points attracted to the origin in a generalised transfinite dynamical system of any n-dimensional integer torus exists; (b) the theory asserting that for any Z ⊆ ω and n, the halting set H n of infinite time n-register machine with oracle Z exists. Suppose f : N −→ N. We are going to cons...

We consider the problem of proving termination of ordersorted rewrite systems. The dominating method for proving termination of order-sorted systems has been to simply ignore sort information, and use the techniques developed for unsorted rewriting. The problem with this approach is that many order-sorted rewrite systems terminate because of the structure of the set of sorts. In these cases the...

We introduce a model of infinitary computation which enhances the infinite time Turing machine model slightly but in a natural way by giving the machines the capability of detecting cardinal stages of computation. The computational strength with respect to ITTMs is determined to be precisely that of the strong halting problem and the nature of the new characteristic ordinals (clockable, writabl...

Among methods of breaking a cipher, exhaustive key search stands out as the most successful (albeit the least efficient) method. We demonstrate that various algorithmic implementations of exhaustive key search are not equally effective, and cryptosystems can be devised which make some implementations of exhaustive key search unsuccessful (in the sense that the problem these algorithms try to so...

We introduce a toy model of the “rat race” in which individuals try to better themselves relative to the rest of the population. An individual is characterized by a real-valued fitness and each advances at a constant rate by an amount that depends on its standing in the population. The leader advances to remain ahead of its nearest neighbor, while all others advance by an amount that is set by ...

It is proved that a large class of distributed tasks cannot be solved in the pr,2s,2nct~ of faulty procc:isor~ Thb, class cmnaills tasks whose unsolvahility ill 111,2 pr,2senc,2 of faalls is knowB (tile cons,211sus task a~ld il!, wltianls, of. Fischer ,21 at. (1985)) as w,dl as some new tasks (e.g., constructing a sF, alming Ire,2). In parlicular, we hitroduce the notion of the decasion graph o...

We consider the notion of randomness relative to an oracle: a real number is random in A if and only if its initial segments are algorithmically incompressible in a self-delimiting universal machine equipped with an oracle A. We prove that the probability that a program for infinite computations outputs a cofinite set is random in the second jump of the halting problem.