William Meroney

Abstract : The document describes, and gives user instructions for, two programs developed by KETRON to provide aircraft readiness and part availability data for the CASEE simulation model. These programs have been developed and tested on a CDC 6600 with 64K words of core. They are coded in FORTRAN 4, with the exception of COMPASS subroutines used to read the 3-M MAF and READY tapes. Conversion of the FORTRAN code to a programming environment where these tapes could be read directly in FORTRAN (e.g., IBM System 360 OS), would eliminate the need for the assembly language subroutines. (Author)

By pointing to deep philosophical confusions endemic to cognitive science, Wittgenstein might seem an enemy of computational approaches. We agree (with Mills 1993) that while Wittgenstein would reject the classicist’s symbols and rules approach, his observations align well with connectionist or neural network approaches. While many connectionisms that dominated the later twentieth century could fall prey to criticisms of biological, pedagogical, and linguistic implausibility, current connectionist approaches can resolve those problems in a Wittgenstein-friendly manner. We (a) present the basics of a Vector Symbolic Architecture formalism, inspired by Smolensky (1990), and indicate how high-dimensional vectors can operate in a context-sensitive and object-independent manner in biologically plausible time scales, reflecting Wittgenstein’s notions of language-games and family resemblance; we (b) show how “soft” symbols for such a formalism can be formed with plausible learning cycles u...

This paper considers competition in electric networks and how the network structure affects the competition. The approach is to examine non-cooperative behavior among producers and calculate a Nash equilibrium under different market specifications. Unlike most other treatments of this problem, which utilize either Cournot or Bertrand models of competition, the model used here examines supply function competition. Two and four node networks are considered. Several results that differ from traditional economic theory are found. In both a two-node and four-node market with imperfect competition among producers, transmission constraints increase their profits (compared to an unconstrained network)—but with little or no change in consumer prices or quantities produced. This is because generators profit primarily at the expense of the owner of transmission rights. The size of the increase in profits depends on the number of firms at each node and the size of the transmission constraint. In the four-node case, an example was found in which decreasing market concentration by breaking up suppliers worsens market efficiency, even if there are no cost diseconomies. In particular, increasing competition at one node increases the consumer price at a second node, and causes an overall decrease in consumer surplus. In general, the cases presented here show that strategic behavior on electric networks may produce results that differ from those predicted by traditional economic theory due to the network structure of the problem.