Bücher veröffentlicht von MIT Press Ltd

Since their inception in 1987, the Artificial Life meetings have grown from small workshops to truly international conferences, reflecting the field's increasing appeal to researchers in all areas of science.

Why did the Soviet Union use less force to preserve the Soviet empire from 1989 to 1991 than it had used in distant and impoverished Angola in 1975? This book examines how actors' preferences and causal conceptions change as they learn from their experiences.

Efforts to contend with tensions inherent in multiethnic societies; case studies of India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, China, Australia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Vanuatu, and the Federated States of Micronesia.

Presents the "great ideas" of computer science that together represent the heart of the field. This second edition of the text includes extra chapters on simulation, operating systems, and networks. In addition, the author has upgraded many of the original chapters.

This book begins with the Gaia hypothesis and ends with the selfish gene theory, making a grand tour of biology from the biggest to the small scale.

A thought-provoking examination of medical technology and the social and moral issues surrounding it; for specialists and nonspecialists.

Natural selection and the controversial issues over the units of selection are the subject of these seventeen essays, grouped in sections that focus on the history of the topic, discuss the levels and units of selection, and present kin, group, and hierarchical models of selection.

Richard Brealey presents a brief, nontechnical description of current research on investment management and its implications for the investment manager.

Essays by leading figures in linguistics, artificial intelligence, and psychology explore the problems involved in creating a general cognitive science that will treat language, thought, and behavior in an integrated fashion.

Volume II of this unique survey of mathematics covers the foundations of geometry, affine and Euclidean geometry, algebraic geometry, the Erlanger Program and higher geometry, group theory approaches, differential geometry, convex figures, and aspects of topology.

Assessing the role of government regulation in occupational safety issues.

Experts consider the nature and distribution of life in the universe--from the origin of life on earth to the search for intelligent life on other planets.

An examination of art education in secondary schools and colleges, asking what kinds of courses best fulfill educational and personal needs.

The purpose of this collection is to present a clear, comprehensible, and highly readable book on the growth of modern cities and their planning.

The first full-scale attempt to analyze the relationship between science and society throughout history, from the perfection of the first flint hand ax to the construction of the hydrogen bomb.

A proposal for a set of social indicators that assess the quality of our social system and the quality of life.

Philosophical reflections on creativity in science, humanities, and human experience as a whole.

How science consultants make movie science plausible, in films ranging from 2001: A Space Odyssey to Finding Nemo.

A new book by Boris Groys acknowledges the problem and potential of art's complex relationship to power.

How tiny variations in our personal DNA can determine how we look, how we behave, how we get sick, and how we get well.

The science behind global warming, and its history: how scientists learned to understand the atmosphere, to measure it, to trace its past, and to model its future.

Two experts on the information economy explore the true economic value of technology and innovation.

How the rise of globalization over the past two centuries helps explain the income gap between rich and poor countries today.

An investigation into the conceptual foundations of a new way of thinking about the mind that does not locate all cognition "in the head."

How eliminating "risk illiteracy" among doctors and patients will lead to better health care decision making.

A classic book about language acquisition and conceptual structure, with a new preface by the author, "The Secret Life of Verbs."

A new edition of Quine's most important work.

Made-Up Minds addresses fundamental questions of learning and concept invention by means of an innovative computer program that is based on the cognitive-developmental theory of psychologist Jean Piaget. Drescher uses Piaget's theory as a source of inspiration for the design of an artificial cognitive system called the schema mechanism, and then uses the system to elaborate and test Piaget's theory. The approach is original enough that readers need not have extensive knowledge of artificial intelligence, and a chapter summarizing Piaget assists readers who lack a background in developmental psychology. The schema mechanism learns from its experiences, expressing discoveries in its existing representational vocabulary, and extending that vocabulary with new concepts. A novel empirical learning technique, marginal attribution, can find results of an action that are obscure because each occurs rarely in general, although reliably under certain conditions. Drescher shows that several early milestones in the Piagetian infant's invention of the concept of persistent object can be replicated by the schema mechanism.

Thinking about space is thinking about spatial things. The table is on the carpet; hence the carpet is under the table. The vase is in the box; hence the box is not in the vase. But what does it mean for an object to be somewhere? How are objects tied to the space they occupy? In this book Roberto Casati and Achille C. Varzi address some of the fundamental issues in the philosophy of spatial representation. Their starting point is an analysis of the interplay between mereology (the study of part/whole relations), topology (the study of spatial continuity and compactness), and the theory of spatial location proper. This leads to a unified framework for spatial representation understood quite broadly as a theory of the representation of spatial entities. The framework is then tested against some classical metaphysical questions such as: Are parts essential to their wholes? Is spatial co-location a sufficient criterion of identity? What (if anything) distinguishes material objects from events and other spatial entities? The concluding chapters deal with applications to topics as diverse as the logical analysis of movement and the semantics of maps.

A sequel to Pollock's How to Build a Person, this volume builds upon that theoretical groundwork for the implementation of rationality through artificial intelligence. Pollock argues that progress in AI has stalled because of its creators' reliance upon unformulated intuitions about rationality. Instead, he bases the OSCAR architecture upon an explicit philosophical theory of rationality, encompassing principles of practical cognition, epistemic cognition, and defeasible reasoning.