Considered as a social contract, a financial safety net imposes duties and confers rights on different sectors of the economy. Within a nation, elements of incompleteness inherent in this contract generate principal-agent conflicts that are mitigated by formal agreements, norms, laws, and the principle of democratic accountability. Across nations, additional gaps emerge that are hard to bridge....

This paper describes the results of applying artificial neural networks to the double dummy bridge problem. Several feedforward neural networks were trained using resilient backpropagation algorithm to estimate the number of tricks to take by players NS in fully revealed contract bridge deals. Training deals were the only data presented to the networks. The best networks were able to perfectly ...

H. Robert Gerberich, 89, died Nov. 29, 2022, in Corpus Christi, Texas. “At the University of Rochester, Bob met fellow student Ronnie who became his wife 65 years. His postdoctoral work was at Carnegie Mellon University. He a research chemist Celanese for entire career, where he received several patents. remained close to those worked with throughout retirement. liked on household carpentry pro...

We argue that bidding in the game of Contract Bridge can profitably be regarded as a micro-world suitable for experimenting with pragmatics. We sketch an analysis in which a "bidding system" is treated as the semantics of an artificial language, and show how this "language", despite its apparent simplicity, is capable of supporting a wide variety of common speech acts parallel to those in natur...

This article summarizes the various approaches to how the law should assign responsibility in a system where health care financing and delivery are combined. Health law scholars have been debating whether conflicts in managed care between individual patient needs and preserving assets for the patient population should be resolved by tort or contract law. Until recently, the literature has been ...

Design by contract is a well known theory that views software construction as based on contracts between clients (callers) and suppliers (routines), relying on mutual obligations and benefits made explicit by assertions. However, there is a gap between this theory and software engineering concepts and tools. For example, dealing with contract violations is realized by exception handlers, wherea...

Design by contract is a well known theory that views software construction as based on contracts between clients (callers) and suppliers (routines), relying on mutual obligations and benefits made explicit by assertions. However, there is a gap between this theory and software engineering concepts and tools. For example, dealing with contract violations is realized by exception handlers, wherea...

This paper investigates the problems arising in the construction of a program to play the game of contract bridge. These problems include both the difficulty of solving the game’s perfect information variant, and techniques needed to address the fact that bridge is not, in fact, a perfect information game. Gib, the program being described, involves five separate technical advances: partition se...