We consider a generalization of the drinking philosophers problem, called GDrPP, in which processes may issue AND-OR requests for resources, as opposed to the AND requests of the original formulation. For GDrPP, we introduce a basic priority dynamics that can be regarded as generalizing the edge-reversal priority dynamics underlying the classical solution to the original formulation. The novel ...

Like morally sensitive hospital staff, philosophers resist routine simplification of morally complex cases. Like hospital clergy, they favour reflective and principled decision-making. Like hospital lawyers, they refine and extend the language we use to formulate and defend our complex decisions. But hospital philosophers are not redundant: they have a wider range of principles and categories a...

The Philosophers' Process is a Markovian version of the famous Dining Philosophers Problem introduced by Dijkstra as a model for resource sharing. It can be viewed as a reversible interacting particle system. This paper deals with the problem of computing its reversible measure in the case of a large but nite number of sites. This equilibrium measure is a Markov eld on the underlying graph of i...

Artificial life (ALife) is the attempt to create artificial instances of life in a variety of media, but primarily within the digital computer. As such, the field brings together computationally-minded biologists and biologically-minded computer scientists. I argue that this new field is filled with interesting philosophical issues. However, there is a dearth of philosophers actively conducting...