In contemporary philosophy of religion, it is customary to think of God as an individual person, who exists in time, and is related to things in the world not only as their cause but also in various respects as their effect.1 On the whole, this model has displaced the so-called 'classical' account, according to which God is pure being and therefore 'simple'. Two kinds of consideration lie behin...

A set is called NP-simple if it lies in NP, and its complement is infinite, and does not contain any infinite subsets in NP. Hartmanis, Li and Yesha [HLY86] proved that no set which is hard for NP under many-one (Karp) reductions is NP-simple unless NP ∩ coNP ⊆ SUBEXP. However, we can exhibit a relativized world in which there is an NP-simple set that is complete under Turing (Cook) reductions,...

Added 27 Jul 2014] Many researchers work on systems that learn. Different sorts of things can be learnt, including abilities of many kinds, and applications of those abilities. Learnable abilities include (in no significant order): abilities to label, abilities to describe, abilities to predict, abilities to manipulate directly or to control indirectly, abilities to perform actions of varying c...

The human mind is known to be sensitive to complexity. For instance, the visual system reconstructs hidden parts of objects following a principle of maximum simplicity. We suggest here that higher cognitive processes, such as the selection of relevant situations, are sensitive to variations of complexity. Situations are relevant to human beings when they appear simpler to describe than to gener...

We describe Jqual, a practical framework for type qualifier inference in Java. Jqual is implemented as an Eclipse plug-in that allows researchers to quickly develop and test modifications to the Java type system based on the flexible, lightweight and familiar mechanism of type qualifiers. We demonstrate one such analysis which supports specification and checking of reference immutability for Ja...

Simplicity has long been recognized as an apparent mark of truth in science, but it is difficult to explain why simplicity should be accorded such weight. This chapter examines some standard, statistical explanations of the role of simplicity in scientific method and argues that none of them explains, without circularity, how a reliance on simplicity could be conducive to finding true models or...