Fernando Soler-Toscano

Alfredo Burrieza, Fernando Soler-Toscano, Antonio Yuste-Ginel

We propose a modal study of the notion of bisimulation. Our contribution is threefold. First, we extend the basic modal language with a new modality $\nbi$, whose intended meaning is universal quantification over all states that are bisimilar to the current one. We show that bisimulations are definable in this object language via frame correspondence. Second, we provide a sound and complete axiomatisation of the class of all pairs of Kripke models that are bisimulation-related. Third, we show that the satisfiability problem of our logic is decidable and PSPACE-complete via a translation to standard modal logic $K$ under a simple frame condition. All our results are encoded and verified by Isabelle/HOL.

Nicolas Gauvrit, Fernando Soler-Toscano, Hector Zenil

Humans are sensitive to complexity and regularity in patterns. The subjective perception of pattern complexity is correlated to algorithmic (Kolmogorov-Chaitin) complexity as defined in computer science, but also to the frequency of naturally occurring patterns. However, the possible mediational role of natural frequencies in the perception of algorithmic complexity remains unclear. Here we reanalyze Hsu et al. (2010) through a mediational analysis, and complement their results in a new experiment. We conclude that human perception of complexity seems partly shaped by natural scenes statistics, thereby establishing a link between the perception of complexity and the effect of natural scene statistics.

Andrés Cordón-Franco, Hans van Ditmarsch, David Fernández-Duque et al.

In the generalized Russian cards problem, the three players Alice, Bob and Cath draw a,b and c cards, respectively, from a deck of a+b+c cards. Players only know their own cards and what the deck of cards is. Alice and Bob are then required to communicate their hand of cards to each other by way of public messages. The communication is said to be safe if Cath does not learn the ownership of any specific card; in this paper we consider a strengthened notion of safety introduced by Swanson and Stinson which we call k-safety. An elegant solution by Atkinson views the cards as points in a finite projective plane. We propose a general solution in the spirit of Atkinson's, although based on finite vector spaces rather than projective planes, and call it the `geometric protocol'. Given arbitrary c,k>0, this protocol gives an informative and k-safe solution to the generalized Russian cards problem for infinitely many values of (a,b,c) with b=O(ac). This improves on the collection of parameters for which solutions are known. In particular, it is the first solution which guarantees $k$-safety when Cath has more than one card.