We analyze the blame-assignment task in the context of experience-based design and redesign of physical devices. We identify three types of blame-assignment tasks that differ in the types of information they take as input: the design does not achieve a desired behavior of the device, the design results in an undesirable behavior, a specific structural element in the design misbehaves. We then d...

The Gap-Hamming distance problem is the promise problem of deciding if the Hamming distance h between two strings of length n is greater than a or less than b, where the gap g = |a − b| ≥ 1 and a and b could depend on n. In this short note, we give a lower bound of Ω( √ n/g) on the quantum query complexity of computing the GapHamming distance between two given strings of lenght n. The proof is ...

The framework of promise theory offers an alternative way of understanding programming models, especially in distributed systems. We show that promise theory can express some familiar constructs and resolve some problems in program interface design, using fewer and simpler concepts than the Unified Modelling Language (UML).

Using Promise Theory as a calculus, I review how to define agency in a scalable way, for the purpose of understanding semantic spacetimes. By following simple scaling rules, replacing individual agents with ‘super-agents’ (sub-spaces), it is shown how agency can be scaled both dynamically and semantically. The notion of occupancy and tenancy, or how space is used and filled in different ways, i...