Andrew Shilliday

A new Gödelian argument for hypercomputing minds based on the busy beaver problem

Abstract Do human persons hypercompute? Or, as the doctrine of computationalism holds, are they information processors at or below the Turing Limit? If the former, given the essence of hypercomputation, persons must in some real way be capable of infinitary information processing. Using as a springboard Godel’s little-known assertion that the human mind has a power “converging to infinity”, and as an anchoring problem Rado’s [T. Rado, On non-computable functions, Bell System Technical Journal 41 (1963) 877–884] Turing-uncomputable “busy beaver” (or Σ ) function, we present in this short paper a new argument that, in fact, human persons can hypercompute. The argument is intended to be formidable, not conclusive: it brings Godel’s intuition to a greater level of precision, and places it within a sensible case against computationalism.

Provability-based semantic interoperability via translation graphs

Provability-based semantic interoperability (PBSI) is a kind of interoperability that transcends mere syntactic translation to allow for robust, meaningful information exchange across systems employing ontologies for which mappings or matchings may not exist, and which can be evaluated by provability-based (PB) queries. We introduce a system of translation graphs to formalize the relationships between diverse ontologies and knowledge representation and reasoning systems, and to automatically generate the translation axioms governing PB information exchange and inter-system reasoning. We demonstrate the use of translation graphs on a small number of simple systems to achieve interoperability.

Reports of the AAAI 2008 Fall Symposia

The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence was pleased to present the 2008 Fall Symposium Series, held Friday through Sunday, November 7-9, at the Westin Arlington Gateway in Arlington, Virginia. The titles of the seven symposia were (1) Adaptive Agents in Cultural Contexts, (2) AI in Eldercare: New Solutions to Old Problems, (3) Automated Scientific Discovery, (4) Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures, (5) Education Informatics: Steps toward the International Internet Classroom, (6) Multimedia Information Extraction, and (7) Naturally Inspired AI.