Our accelerating computational demand and the rise of multicore hardware have made parallel programs, especially shared-memory multithreaded programs, increasingly pervasive and critical. Yet, these programs remain extremely difficult to write, test, analyze, debug, and verify. Conventional wisdom has attributed these difficulties to nondeterminism, and researchers have recently dedicated much ...

conditions, would they choose to hold on to the concrete judgment that Bill is morally responsible or the abstract judgment that no one can be responsible in a deterministic universe? The results showed no clear majority on either side. Approximately half of the subjects chose to hold onto the judgment that the particular agent was morally responsible, while the other half chose to hold onto th...

A goal-pursuing agent must somehow ascertain when an action would serve as a means to achieving a goal. Various criteria (causal, evidential, counterfactual) have been proposed (e.g. Joyce 1999). Examining Newcomb’s Problem (Nozick 1969) and more-mundane thought experiments, I argue for an acausal but non-evidentialist counterfactual criterion (but without invoking the “possible worlds” of e.g....