The goal of the present paper is to provide a systematic and comprehensive study of rational stochastic languages over a semiring K ∈ {Q,Q,R,R}. A rational stochastic language is a probability distribution over a free monoid Σ which is rational over K, that is which can be generated by a multiplicity automata with parameters in K. We study the relations between the classes of rational stochasti...

Finding paths in high-dimensional gemetric spaces is a provably hard problem. Recently, a general randomized planning scheme has emerged as an e ective approach to solve this problem. In this scheme, the planner samples the space at random and build a network of simple paths, called a probabilistic roadmap. This paper describes a basic probabilistic roadmap planner, which is easily parallelizab...

This paper introduces probabilistic databases with unmerged duplicates (DBud), i.e., databases containing probabilistic information about instances found to describe the same real-world objects. We discuss the need for efficiently querying such databases and for supporting practical query scenarios that require analytical or summarized information. We also sketch possible methodologies and tech...

Deceptive path-planning involves finding a path such that the probability of an observer identifying its final destination—before it has been reached— is minimised. This paper formalises deception as it applies to path-planning and introduces the notion of a last deceptive point (LDP) which, when measured in terms of path completion, can be used to rank paths by their potential to deceive. Buil...

In this note we formally show a well known (but not well documented) fact that in order to beat the famous Shannon lower bound on key length for one-time-secure encryption, one must simultaneously restrict the attacker to be efficient, and also allow the attacker to break the system with some non-zero (i.e., negligible) probability. Our proof handles probabilistic encryption, as well as a small...