Professional Closure Beyond State Authorization

Session State: Beyond Soft State

The cost and complexity of administration of large systems has come to dominate their total cost of ownership. Stateless and soft-state components, e.g. Web servers or network routers, are easy to manage: capacity can be scaled incrementally by adding more nodes, rebalancing of load after failover is easy, and reactive or proactive (“rolling”) reboots can be used to handle transient failures. W...

Kleene Closure and State Complexity

We prove that the automaton presented by Maslov [Soviet Math. Doklady 11, 1373–1375 (1970)] meets the upper bound 3/4 · 2n on the state complexity of Kleene closure. This fixes a small error in this paper that claimed the upper bound 3/4 · 2n − 1. Our main result shows that the upper bounds 2n−1 + 2n−1−k on the state complexity of Kleene closure of a language accepted by an n-state DFA with k f...

State-Society Relations Beyond the Weberian State

Extreme State Aggregation beyond MDPs

We consider a Reinforcement Learning setup where an agent interacts with an environment in observation-reward-action cycles without any (esp. MDP) assumptions on the environment. State aggregation and more generally feature reinforcement learning is concerned with mapping histories/raw-states to reduced/aggregated states. The idea behind both is that the resulting reduced process (approximately...

Beyond dogmatism: the need for closure as related to religion

Our theoretical assumption is that behind the dogmatism-religion positive but not systematic relation, a clearer one may exist between religion and need for closure (Webster & Kruglanski, 1994). A positive association of religiosity with need for closure was hypothesized (except with the decisiveness facet). Subjects (n = 239) were administered the Need for Closure Scale (NFCS), the Religious F...