One main issue in the field of algorithmic composition is the relationshipbetween the algorithm and the final musical structure. This article investigatesthat relationship further and presents a method of algorithmic thinking in whichthe musical form is the starting point. Kimon, an object-oriented programming environment for computer-aidedcomposition in which one creates abstractions of musical form, will beintroduced. The aim is to take algorithmic composition closer to the musicaloutput in order to work systematically with form and dramaturgy. Anelectroacoustic piece that has been conceived and generated in its entirety bythe system will also be presented.

Four compositions for cello and string quartet on tape by American intermedia artist Phill Niblock originating from 1974 to 2003 are discussed. The interdependence of compositional approach and available technology is considered, leading to the observation that the electronic music composer's technique is considerably independent of the available technology. Where a dependence of artistic development on factors not originally musical has to be acknowledged, these nonmusical factors lie not so much in the technology but in Niblock's interpretation of it. This is discussed within the context of philosophical observations on art and technology by Theodor W. Adorno, Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer.

Composers have spent more than fifty years devising computer programs for the semi-automated production of music. This article shall focus in particular on the case of minimal run-time human intervention, where a program allows the creation of a musical variation, typically unravelling in realtime, on demand. These systems have the capacity to vary their output with each run, often from no more input information than the seeding of a random number generator with the start time. Such artworks are accumulating, released online as downloads, or exhibited through streaming radio sites such as rand()%. Listener/users and composer/designers may wish for deeper insight into these programs' ontological status, mechanisms and creative potential. These works are challenging to dissect; this article makes a tentative start at confronting the unique problems and rich behaviours of computer-program-based generative music, from the social and historical context to the backwards engineering of programs in relation to their sound world. After a discussion of exemplars and definitions of generative art, strategies for analysis are outlined. To provide practical examples, analyses are provided of two small scale works by James McCartney.

This paper addresses questions regarding the performance of interactive music compositions through an examination of the author's own works. The questions emerge from the compositional impetus and the subsequent technical design of each of the works. The paper also examines some of the forces impacting the performance, preservation and long-term viability of interactive works and non-interactive electroacoustic compositions.

A composer who has worked in the field of computer music for the last 25 years reflects on how technological developments during that time have affected his work in computer music, instrumental music and hybrid combinations of the two. The compositional trajectories traced here often run parallel to opportunities afforded by the evolution of computer technology suitable for the generation of digital audio.

Computers contain layers of abstraction between the raw audio bits and the user experience; each layer requires a method of traversal that reflects the attitudes of the programmer/composer/performer. The navigation of this hierarchy results in modes of thought that affect notions of how musical signifiers can be subverted and redefined. This explosion of individualistic technological systems defines meaning for new sonic results, devoid of traditional communicative signs; the manipulations within these systems directly assail the traditional signification of artistic value and of institutional canonisation. A few pieces and scenarios are presented as examples. Additionally presented are two opposing tendencies (with some empirical manifestations) in the creation of live performances systems, here labelled as extensional and algorithmic. The article posits that a performance system cannot amplify human expression without necessarily having either predefined processes or predefined limitations, and that the choice in this design is reflected in the composer's attitude towards layer-traversal.

This DVD contains both audio and video files. The DVD will play audio and audiovisual tracks either on a standard DVD player or on your computer. Full information related to this DVD can be found in the relevant articles.

In everyday life it happens that a person has to reason out what other peoplethink and how they behave, in order to achieve his goals. In other words, anindividual may be required to adapt his behavior by reasoning about the others'mental state. In this paper we focus on a knowledge-representation languagederived from logic programming which both supports the representation of mentalstates of individual communities and provides each with the capability ofreasoning about others' mental states and acting accordingly. The proposedsemantics is shown to be translatable into stable model semantics of logicprograms with aggregates.

In this study, we consider a model based robust control scheme for kinematically redundant robot manipulators that also enables the use of self motion of the manipulator to perform multiple sub-tasks (e.g., maintaining manipulability, avoidance of mechanical joint limits, and obstacle avoidance). The controller proposed ensures uniformly ultimately bounded end-effector and sub-task tracking despite the parametric uncertainty associated with the dynamic model. A Lyapunov based approach has been utilized in the controller design and extension to a non minimum set of parameters for orientation representation has been presented to illustrate the flexibility of the approach. Extensive simulation studies performed initially on a 3 link planar robot arm (for the planar case) and on a six degree of freedom (DOF) Puma type robot arm (for the 3D case with quaternion feedback) are presented to demonstrate the capabilities and the performance of the controller. The results were then experimentally tested on an actual Puma 560 robot to illustrate the feasibility of the proposed method.

We introduce an extended tableau calculus for answer set programming (ASP). Theproof system is based on the ASP tableaux defined in the work by Gebser andSchaub (Tableau calculi for answer set programming. In Proceedings ofthe 22nd International Conference on Logic Programming (ICLP 2006),S. Etalle and M. Truszczynski, Eds. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol.4079. Springer, 11–25) with an added extension rule. We investigatethe power of Extended ASP Tableaux both theoretically and empirically. We studythe relationship of Extended ASP Tableaux with the Extended Resolution proofsystem defined by Tseitin for sets of clauses, and separate Extended ASPTableaux from ASP Tableaux by giving a polynomial-length proof for a family ofnormal logic programs {Φn} for which ASP Tableaux has exponential-length minimal proofs withrespect to n. Additionally, Extended ASP Tableaux implyinteresting insight into the effect of program simplification on the lengths ofproofs in ASP. Closely related to Extended ASP Tableaux, we empiricallyinvestigate the effect of redundant rules on the efficiency of ASP solving.

Suppose that n > (log k)ck, where c is a fixed positive constant. We prove that, no matter how the edges of Kn are coloured with k colours, there is a copy of K4 whose edges receive at most two colours. This improves the previous best bound of kc′k, where c′ is a fixed positive constant, which follows from results on classical Ramsey numbers.

Starting from a sequence regarded as a walk through some set of values, we consider the associated loop-erased walk as a sequence of directed edges, with an edge from i to j if the loop-erased walk makes a step from i to j. We introduce a colouring of these edges by painting edges with a fixed colour as long as the walk does not loop back on itself, then switching to a new colour whenever a loop is erased, with each new colour distinct from all previous colours. The pattern of colours along the edges of the loop-erased walk then displays stretches of consecutive steps of the walk left untouched by the loop-erasure process. Assuming that the underlying sequence generating the loop-erased walk is a sequence of independent random variables, each uniform on [N] := {1, 2, . . ., N}, we condition the walk to start at N and stop the walk when it first reaches the subset [k], for some 1 ≤ k ≤ N − 1. We relate the distribution of the random length of this loop-erased walk to the distribution of the length of the first loop of the walk, via Cayley's enumerations of trees, and via Wilson's algorithm. For fixed N and k, and i = 1, 2, . . ., let Bi denote the events that the loop-erased walk from N to [k] has i + 1 or more edges, and the ith and (i + 1)th of these edges are coloured differently. We show that, given that the loop-erased random walk has j edges for some 1 ≤ j ≤ N − k, the events Bi for 1 ≤ i ≤ j − 1 are independent, with the probability of Bi equal to 1/(k + i + 1). This determines the distribution of the sequence of random lengths of differently coloured segments of the loop-erased walk, and yields asymptotic descriptions of these random lengths as N → ∞.

In this paper we provide a simple formula for the expected time for a random recursive tree to grow to a given height.

Tracers provide users with useful information about program executions. In thisarticle, we propose a “tracer driver”. From a single tracer,it provides a powerful front-end enabling multiple dynamic analysis tools to beeasily implemented, while limiting the overhead of the trace generation. Therelevant execution events are specified by flexible event patterns and a largevariety of trace data can be given either systematically or “ondemand”. The proposed tracer driver has been designed in the contextof constraint logic programming (CLP); experiments have been made withinGNU-Prolog. Execution views provided by existing tools have been easily emulatedwith a negligible overhead. Experimental measures show that the flexibility andpower of the described architecture lead to good performance. The tracer driveroverhead is inversely proportional to the average time between two tracedevents. Whereas the principles of the tracer driver are independent of thetraced programming language, it is best suited for high-level languages, such asCLP, where each traced execution event encompasses numerous low-level executionsteps. Furthermore, CLP is especially hard to debug. The current environments donot provide all the useful dynamic analysis tools. They can significantlybenefit from our tracer driver which enables dynamic analyses to be integratedat a very low cost.

A general new methodology using evolutionary algorithms viz., Elitist Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm (NSGA-II) and Multi-objective Differential Evolution (MODE), for obtaining optimal trajectory planning of an industrial robot manipulator (PUMA 560 robot) in the presence of fixed and moving obstacles with payload constraint is presented. The problem has a multi-criterion character in which six objective functions, 32 constraints and 288 variables are considered. A cubic NURBS curve is used to define the trajectory. The average fuzzy membership function method is used to select the best optimal solution from Pareto optimal fronts. Two multi-objective performance measures namely solution spread measure and ratio of non-dominated individuals are used to evaluate the strength of Pareto optimal fronts. Two more multi-objective performance measures namely optimiser overhead and algorithm effort are used to find computational effort of the NSGA-II and MODE algorithms. The Pareto optimal fronts and results obtained from various techniques are compared and analysed. Both NSGA-II and MODE are best for this problem.