In recent years, many studies have explored the conditions in which irrelevant visual distractors affect saccades trajectories. These previous studies mainly focused on the low-level stimulus characteristics and how they affect the magnitude of curvature. The present study explored the possible effect of high level semantic information on saccade curvature. Semantic saliency was manipulated by ...

In this paper, we define and study the general framework of Simple Temporal Problems with Taboo regions (STPTs) and show how these problems capture metric temporal reasoning aspects which are common to many real-world applications. STPTs encode simple temporal constraints between events and user-defined taboo regions on the timeline, during which no event is allowed to take place. We discuss tw...

We introduce taboo evolutionary programming, a very efficient global optimization method which combines features of single-point mutation evolutionary programming (SPMEP) and taboo search. As demonstrated by solving 18 benchmark problems, the algorithm is not trapped in local minima and quickly approaches the global minimum. The results are superior to those from SPMEP, fast evolutionary progra...

This article examines whether recent changes in the security environment, including North Korea’s nuclear test of October 2006, are driving Japan to consider the acquisition of its own nuclear deterrent. It argues that a combination of three factors have thus far sustained Japan’s nuclear restraint: (1) national identity as a non-nuclear weapon state, (2) commitment to global nuclear nonprolife...

We compare in this paper the best heuristic methods known up to now to solve the flow shop sequencing problem and we improve the complexity of the best one. Next, we apply to this problem taboo search, a new technique to solve combinatorial optimization problems, and we report computational experiments. Finally a parallel taboo search algorithm is presented and experimental results show that th...