Kybernetes

B.H. Rudall

2004 Kybernetes

doi: 10.1108/03684920410545225

Presents reports and surveys of selective research and development in systems and cybernetics. They include: biometric systems; artificial intelligence; innovations; cybernetics and automation and quantum computing.

Alex M. Andrew

2004 Kybernetes

doi: 10.1108/03684920410545234

The centenary of Gregory Bateson is noted, with reference to a mailing list and relevant Web sites. Various means of combating spam are reviewed.

Uri Fidelman

2004 Kybernetes

doi: 10.1108/03684920410545243

It was suggested by Fidelman that Kantian ideas, namely, actual Infinity, the cosmos, a reason for the cosmos and consciousness, involve a cognitive conflict. This cognitive conflict is caused by a competition between the left‐ and right‐hemispheric cerebral mechanisms, and it causes us to feel that we encounter a paradox. It is suggested in this study that quantum particles too are Kantian ideas. According to Kant the logic of experience does not necessarily apply to Kantian ideas, which are not part of experience. Thus, Kant explained the paradoxes related to them. It is suggested that the cognitive paradoxes related to quantum particles are also related to a conflict between the hemispheric mechanisms.

Richard S. Segall

2004 Kybernetes

doi: 10.1108/03684920410545252

Provides a background on the concepts and development of data mining and data warehousing that need to be known by students and educators. Then discusses the applications of data mining for the construction of graphical mappings of the sensory space as a two‐dimensional neural network grid as well as the traveling salesman problem (TSP) and simulated annealing. Data mining is also used as a tool for the construction of computer graphics as solutions to the TSP and also for the activation of an output neuron for a three‐layer feed‐forward network that is trained using a Boolean function. Conclusions and future directions of the research are also discussed.

B. Hebri; Y. Cherruault

2004 Kybernetes

doi: 10.1108/03684920410545261

This paper studies the existence and uniqueness of parameters identification in linear compartmental systems using successive resolutions of linear algebraic systems. These results can be exploited to build up simple numerical algorithms involving only algebraic linear systems. Compartmental analysis is the main mathematical technique for modelling phenomena arising in biology and medicine.

Mohamed Benabidallah; Yves Cherruault

2004 Kybernetes

doi: 10.1108/03684920410545270

Considers the Adomian decomposition method to be a powerful technique that can solve efficiently a large class of linear and nonlinear differential equations. Describes a general method for approximating the solution of the Laplace equation with Dirichlet‐boundary conditions and which can be applied to a large class of problems.

Tiziana Ligorio

2004 Kybernetes

doi: 10.1108/03684920410545289

Affinities and shared ideas may be found at the foundations of both fuzzy set theory and the western philosophical movement commonly referred to as Postmodernism. The interest in highlighting these affinities is driven by the fact that the ideas and beliefs that are questioned by both these movements are exactly those which stand (or used to stand) as foundations of both western philosophy and science, and have their roots in an Aristotelian view of the world. By direct comparison between concepts drawn from passages of the main philosophers of the Postmodern movement and fundamentals of fuzzy set theory, parallelisms and commonalities are brought to the surface.

Edward T. Lee

2004 Kybernetes

doi: 10.1108/03684920410545298

Pictures are natural and effective means of communication among people, computers, and robotics. A pictorial database is a collection of sharable pictorial data encoded in various formats. During the past several years, pictorial databases have attracted growing attention as an important component in building pictorial information systems as well as intelligent information systems. Eight research tasks are presented. They are comparing the numerical and the linguistic variable approaches, examining new linguistic hedges, studying the similarity of various similarity measures, investigating pictorial data compression techniques, performing pictorial data compression using array grammars, applying the entity‐relationship (ER) model to picture description; further investigating the relationship hierarchy for picture representation using ER diagrams, and extracting pictorial knowledge from pictorial databases. The research results may have a major impact on the development of object‐oriented pictorial databases.

Alex M. Andrew

2004 Kybernetes

doi: 10.1108/03684920410545306

The use of ten as a radix for everyday numbering seems to be a suitable compromise. Non‐decimal numbers have applications in error detection and in computing. In the latter, it is interesting that there has been competition between octal and hexadecimal formats for manual interaction, and one reason for the prevalence of the latter is attributed to the use of seven‐line character displays and an improbable feature of this in relation to the English alphabet.