Continuous and discrete models of cooperation in complex bacterial colonies

We study the effect of discreteness on various models for patterning in bacterial colonies. In a bacterial colony with branching pattern, there are discrete entities - bacteria - which are only two orders of magnitude smaller than the elements of the macroscopic pattern. We present two types of models. The first is the Communicating Walkers model, a hybrid model composed of both continuous fields and discrete entities - walkers, which are coarse-graining of the bacteria. Models of the second type are systems of reaction diffusion equations, where the branching of the pattern is due to non-constant diffusion coefficient of the bacterial field. The diffusion coefficient represents the effect of self-generated lubrication fluid on the bacterial movement. We implement the discreteness of the biological system by introducing a cutoff in the growth term at low bacterial densities. We demonstrate that the cutoff does not improve the models in any way. Its only effect is to decrease the effective surface tension of the front, making it more sensitive to anisotropy. We compare the models by introducing food chemotaxis and repulsive chemotactic signaling into the models. We find that the growth dynamics of the Communication Walkers model and the growth dynamics of the Non-Linear diffusion model are affected in the same manner. From such similarities and from the insensitivity of the Communication Walkers model to implicit anisotropy we conclude that the increased discreteness, introduced be the coarse-graining of the walkers, is small enough to be neglected.Comment: 16 pages, 10 figures in 13 gif files, to be published in proceeding of CMDS

A Proposal For An Intelligent Debugging Assistant

There are many ways to find bugs in programs. For example, observed input and output values can be compared to predicted values. An execution trace can be examined to locate errors in control flow. The utility of these and other strategies depends on the quality of the specifications available. The Debugging Assistant chooses the most appropriate debugging strategy based on the specification information available and the context of the bug. Particular attention has been given to applying techniques from the domain of hardware troubleshooting to the domain of software debugging. This has revealed two important differences between the two domains: (1) Unlike circuits, programs rarely come with complete specifications of their behavior, and (2) Unlike circuits, the cost of probing inputs and outputs of programs is low.MIT Artificial Intelligence Laborator

Analysis of π\pid elastic scattering data to 500 MeV

An energy-dependent and a set of single-energy partial-wave analyses of $\pi$d elastic scattering data have been completed. Amplitudes are presented for pion laboratory kinetic energies up to 500~MeV. These results are compared with those found in other recent analyses. We comment on the present database and make suggestions for future work. ( Figures are available from the authors upon request. )Comment: 22 pages of text. VPI-CAPS-7/

Testing formula satisfaction

We study the query complexity of testing for properties defined by read once formulae, as instances of massively parametrized properties, and prove several testability and non-testability results. First we prove the testability of any property accepted by a Boolean read-once formula involving any bounded arity gates, with a number of queries exponential in \epsilon and independent of all other parameters. When the gates are limited to being monotone, we prove that there is an estimation algorithm, that outputs an approximation of the distance of the input from satisfying the property. For formulae only involving And/Or gates, we provide a more efficient test whose query complexity is only quasi-polynomial in \epsilon. On the other hand we show that such testability results do not hold in general for formulae over non-Boolean alphabets; specifically we construct a property defined by a read-once arity 2 (non-Boolean) formula over alphabets of size 4, such that any 1/4-test for it requires a number of queries depending on the formula size

Unified Chew-Mandelstam SAID analysis of pion photoproduction data

A unified description of single-pion photoproduction data, together with pion- and eta-hadroproduction data, has been achieved in a Chew-Mandelstam parametrization which is consistent with unitarity at the two-body level. Energy-dependent and single-energy partial wave analyses of pion photoproduction data have been performed and compared to previous SAID fits and multipoles from the Mainz and Bonn-Gatchina groups.Comment: 11 pages, 9 figures, and 2 table