Wire billiards, the first steps

First Steps Towards Experimental Design in Evaluating Layout Layout Algorithms: Wire Length versus Wire Crossing in Linear Placement Optimization

This report introduces an experimental design that discovers a new relationship between a cell placement for minimized wire crossing in bipartite (two-layer) graphs and a cell placement in linear arrangement, optimized for minimum total wire length as measured after rectilinear routing in a single channel. We introduce hypercrossing, a new crossing model for graphs, and demonstrate that the tot...

The First Steps in Seeing

First Steps: Minding

Fostering collaborative efforts among ethicists, researchers and administrators (including Research Integrity Officers) would certainly seem to lay a direct path to enhancing research integrity at the academic research institution. Before collaborations among these groups of professionals may be explored, however, the cultural and cognitive gaps between these professions must be filled. And a p...

First Steps Toward Narrative

Marya Schechtman has argued that contemporary attempts to save Locke’s account of personal identity suffer the same faults that are to be found in Locke, among which is an inability to capture the role our unconscious states play. To avoid these problems, she advocates giving up the mainstream Psychological View and adopting a narrative account like her ‘SelfUnderstanding’ View that, she claims...

Simulating Evolution's First Steps

We demonstrate a simple artificial chemistry environment in which two small evolutionary transitions from the simplest self-replicators to larger ones are observed. The replicators adapt to increasingly harsh environments, where they must synthesise the components they need for replication. The evolution of a biosynthetic pathway of increasing length is thus achieved, through the use of simple ...