In this concise book based on his Arne Ryde Lectures in 2002, Young suggests a conceptual framework for studying strategic learning and highlights theoretical developments in the area. He discusses the interactive learning problem; reinforcement and regret; equilibrium; conditional no-regret learning; prediction, postdiction, and calibration; fictitious play and its variants; Bayesian learning; and hypothesis testing. Young's framework emphasizes the amount of information required to implement different types of learning rules, criteria for evaluating their performance, and alternative notions of equilibrium to (...) which they converge. He also stresses the limits of what can be achieved: for a given type of game and a given amount of information, there may exist no learning procedure that satisfies certain reasonable criteria of performance and convergence. In short, Young has provided a valuable primer that delineates what we know, what we would like to know, and the limits of what we can know, when we try to learn about a system that is composed of other learners. (shrink)

Aischylos darf als der eigentliche Schöpfer der Tragödie als literarischer Kunstform gelten, so sehr diese im 5. vorchristlichen Jahrhundert auch an ihren kultischen Ursprung gebunden bleibt. Aischylos führt den zweiten Schauspieler ein und nutzt technische Erfindungen zur Steigerung szenischer Effekte. Außerdem ist er der große Gestalter der tetralogischen Komposition, d.h. der Verbindung dreier Tragödien und eines Satyrspiels zu einer Handlungseinhait, die es ihm ermöglicht, die Verkettung von Hybris, Ate und Dike an ganzen Geschlechtern über Generationen hin zur Darstellung zu bringen. (...) Im Mittelpunkt seines Denkens steht die notwendig schuldhafte Existenz des handelnden Menschen, für den die Erfüllung einer überpersönlichen Forderung zugleich den Verstoß gegen eine andere, ebenso gültige Norm bedeutet. Überbrückt wird diese tragische Weltsicht im Glauben an die von Zeus repräsentierte Weltordnung, die den Menschen im einzelnen zwar unbegreiflich bleibt, deren grundsätzliche Sinnhaftigkeit sich ihm jedoch im Leiden erschließt. Adäquaten Ausdruck findet dieses Denken in einer urtümlichen und gewaltigen Sprache, deren Übersetzung in der hier vorliegenden Ausgabe philologisch präzis ist und gleichzeitig das Verständnis des aischyleischen Dramas erleichtert. (shrink)

The relative neglect of Greek commentary by modern Aristotelian scholarship could be justified, if only the neglectors had sufficient knowledge of the material they disdain. The curt dismissal of ancient views on the active intellect by W. D. Ross is perhaps a paradigm case of misplaced condemnation, for he evidently failed to take account of what their authors were about. It would be open to those who wish to discount these commentators to argue that they were, to a greater or (...) lesser extent, influenced by their Neoplatonism, and that this impairs their judgment on Aristotelian problems. But that would not be sufficient ground for total neglect: it merely indicates the need for careful utilization. One might go so far as to ask whether it is not perfectly possible for a commentator who happened to be a Neoplatonist to offer straightforward and reasonably unbiased commentary on Aristotle. Even if the answer to that question were negative, is it not likely that such Neoplatonic views as he read into Aristotle would at least be slanted towards Aristotelianism? (shrink)

It is demonstrated on the basis of the Dirac equation that quarks cannot be confined by a vector gluon potential of the form(r/r 0)a or[ln(r/r 0]a, a>0, if the quark-gluon interaction conserves parity. In order to confine quarks with the parity-conserving interaction, the effective gluon potential must be a pseudovector or a scalar. These are shown in a simple Yang-Mills field with theSU(2) group.

First published in 1935, The Life and Writings of Giambattista Vico is a succinct biography of the Italian philosopher, Giambattista Vico. Carefully documented, the book comments on Vico's life as well as his oeuvre in a bid to extend his audience to the English-speaking population. From his early childhood to the influence of his writings after his death, the book provides a keen insight into the many facets of his philosophy. This book will be of interest to students of philosophy (...) and history. (shrink)

"We prove that any variety of relation algebras which contains an algebra with infinitely many elements below the identity, or which contains the full group relation algebra on some infinite group (or on arbitrarily large finite groups), must have an undecidable equational theory. Then we construct an embedding of the lattice of all subsets of the natural numbers into the lattice of varieties of relation algebras such that the variety correlated with a set [italic capital]X of natural numbers has a (...) decidable equational theory if and only if [italic capital]X is a decidable (i.e., recursive) set. Finally, we construct an example of an infinite, finitely generated, simple, representable relation algebra that has a decidable equational theory.'' -- Abstract. (shrink)

In discussing fundamentals of general-relativistic irreversible continuum thermodynamics, this theory is shown to be characterized by the feature that no thermodynamical degrees of freedom are ascribed to gravitation. However, accepting that black hole thermodynamics seems to oppose this harmlessness of gravitation one is called on to consider other approaches. Therefore, in brief some gravitational and thermodynamical alternatives are reviewed.

It has been argued that if an animal is psychologically like us, there may be more scientific reason to experiment upon it, but less moral justification to do so. Some scientists deny the existence of this dilemma, claiming that although there are scientifically valuable similarities between humans and animals that make experimentation worthwhile, humans are at the same time unique and fundamentally different. This latter response is, ironically, typical of pre-Darwinian beliefs in the relationship between human and non-human animals. Another (...) irony is that debate about such issues has facilitated the participation once more of philosophers in questions concerning experimental psychology: ironic because laboratory-oriented psychologists, especially since the turn of the last century, had been eager to establish the independence of their subject from any influence of philosophy and its investigative methods, as well as from any kind of anthropomorphism.In Britain, certainly more so than in the United States, ethical constraints have prevented the development of psychological research with animals along certain routes. By the 1980s British professional and academic societies had published codes of conduct and guidelines for their members, in part responding to public concern about the welfare of animals in the psychological laboratory. What led to the establishment of these codes and guidelines? This paper analyses the historical background against which professional concern for ethical cost in experimental animal psychology began to take shape, leading to the societies' open pronouncements of the 1980s. (shrink)