There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

An Introduction to MultiAgent Systems.

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the mathematical theory of computation. Computation essentially explores how machines can be made to carry out intellectual processes. Any intellectual process that can be carried out mechanically can be performed by a general purpose digital computer. There are three established directions of mathematical research that are relevant to the science of computation—namely, numerical analysis, theory of computability, and theory of finite automata. The chapter explores what practical results can be expected from a suitable mathematical theory. Further, the chapter presents several descriptive formalisms with a few examples of their use and theories that enable to prove the equivalence of computations expressed in these formalisms. A few mathematical results about the properties of the formalisms are also presented.

A Basis for a Mathematical Theory of Computation

In this paper, we examine an argument-based semantics called semi-stable semantics. Semi-stable semantics is quite close to traditional stable semantics in the sense that every stable extension is also a semi-stable extension. One of the advantages of semi-stable semantics is that there exists at least one semi-stable extension. Furthermore, if there also exists at least one stable extension, then the semi-stable extensions coincide with the stable extensions. This, and other properties, make semi-stable semantics an attractive alternative for the more traditional stable semantics, which until now has been widely used in fields such as logic programming and answer set programming.

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Semi-Stable Semantics

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ACM Transactions on Database Systems

We recall some of the better known approaches to non-classical logics, with an emphasis on the contributions of Arnon Avron to the subject and in relation to the papers in this volume.

Ofer Arieli

Papers

Introduction: Non-classical Logics—Between Semantics and Proof Theory (In Relation to Arnon Avron’s Work)