Why the R-completion works

Why the damped trend works

The damped trend method of exponential smoothing is a benchmark that has been difficult to beat in empirical studies of forecast accuracy. One explanation for this success is the flexibility of the method, which contains a variety of special cases that are automatically selected during the fitting process. That is, when the method is fitted, the optimal parameters usually define a special case ...

Why PRODIGY/EBL Works

Explanation-Based Learning (EBL) fails to accelerate problem solving in some problem spaces. How do these problem spaces differ from the ones in Minton’s experiments [1988b]? Can minute modifications to problem space encoding drastically alter EBL’s performance? Will PRODIGY/EBL'S success scale to real-world domains? This paper presents a formal theory of problem space structure that answers th...

Why exercise works magic.

Why Pattern Search Works

Pattern search methods are a class of direct search methods for nonlinear optimization. Since the introduction of the original pattern search methods in the late 1950s and early 1960s, they have remained popular with users due to their simplicity and the fact that they work well in practice on a variety of problems. More recently, the fact that they are provably convergent has generated renewed...

Why Globalization Works

Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator at the Financial Times, is a brilliant journalist and an able economist. Why Globalization Works is an excellent example of the author’s capacity for examination and analysis. The book is based on a series of articles on globalization that originally appeared in the FT, and on his Hayek Memorial Lecture to the Institute of Economic Affairs in London. Wol...