This paper gives a model to explain one phenomenon found in the process of creative concept formation, i.e. the phenomenon that people often get trapped in some state where the mental world remains nebulous and sometimes suddenly make a jump to a new concept. This phenomenon has been qualitatively explained mainly by the philosophers but there have not been models for explaining it quantitatively. Such model is necessary in a new research field to study the systems for aiding human creative activities. So far, the work on creation aid has not had theoretical background and the systems have been built based only on trial and error. The model given in this paper explains some aspects of the phenomena found in creative activities and give some suggestions for the future systems for aiding creative concept formation.

This paper describes a novel method to calculate the fields scattered by a polyhedron structure for an incident plane wave. In this method, the fields diffracted by an edge are calculated using the equivalent edge currents which are separated into components dependent on each of the two surfaces which form the edge. The separated equivalent edge currents are based on the Geometrical Theory of Diffraction (GTD). Using this Separated Equivalent Edge Current Method (SEECM) , fields scattered by a polyhedron structure can be calculated without special treatment of the singularity in the diffraction coefficient. This method can be also applied successfully to structures with convex surfaces by modeling them as polyhedron structures.

The character binarization method MTC is developed for enhancing the recognition of characters in general outdoor images. Such recognition is traditionally difficult because of the influence of illumination changes, especially strong shadow, and also changes in character, such as apparent character sizes. One way to overcome such difficulties is to restrict objects to be processed by using strong hypotheses, such as type of object, object orientation and distance. Several systems for automatic license plate reading are being developed using such strong hypotheses. However. their strong assumptions limit their applications and complicate the extension of the systems. The MTC method assumes the most reasonable hypotheses possible for characters: they occupy plane areas, consist of narrow lines, and external shadow is considerably larger than character lines. The first step is to eliminate the effect of local brightness changes by enhancing feature including characters. This is achieved by applying mathematical morphology by using a logarithmic function. The enhanced gray-scale image is then binarized. Accurate binarization is achieved because local thresholds are determined from the edges detected in the image. The MTC method yields stable binary results under illumination changes, and, consequently, ensures high character reading rates. This is confirmed with a large number of images collected under a wide variety of weather conditions. It is also shown experimentally that MTC permits stable recognition rate even if the characters vary in size.

The transient scattering of a half sine pulse wave by a conducting rectangular cylinder with an open sidewall is rigorously analyzed by using the point matching method (taking into account the edge condition exactly) combined with the fast inversion of Laplace transform. Numerical results are presented for back scattered and forward scattered responses of the far fields when a half sine pulse is incident on the open side and the closed side of the cylinder. The physical meaning of the transient responses is discussed in detail. The comparison of the responses with those by a perfect conducting rectangular cylinder is presented.

A novel approximate equivalent edge currents (EECs) are proposed for use in the modified edge representation (MER) for flat plates. It was reported that PO-EECs with classical PO diffraction coefficients, as applied to MER, perfectly recover PO surface integration. The inclusion of classical FW-EECs as it is, however, would not enhance the accuracy since the reality of the fringe wave is lost in the edge modification. This paper presents simple approximation for inclusion of FW-EECs in MER; FW-EECs are weighted by the function of the angle between the modified edge and the real edge. The key feature of this approach is that uniform fields are predicted everywhere though only classical diffraction coefficients are used. MER also simplifies the ray-tracing in the secondary diffraction analysis. Numerical results for diffraction from flat plates demonstrate the potential of these EECs.

This system called COKIS automatically extracts knowledge about C functions from the UNIX on-line manual by using its description paragraph and the user can interactively inquire to the system in order to know about UNIX C functions. The idea is motivated on the one side to free users from being involved in an exhaustive knowledge acquisition in the past, and to examine problems in understanding knowledge itself on the other. We propose Memory Processor which is implemented to realize extracting knowledges from corpus and processing dialogues in the inquiry system at the same modules.

Based on distributed artificial intelligence technology, the paper proposes a distributed expert system for distribution system planning. The developed expert system is made up of a set of problem-solving agents that autonomously process local tasks and cooperatively interoperate with each other by a shared database in order to reach a proper distribution plan. In addition, a two-level control mechanism composed of local-control and meta-control is also proposed to achieve a high degree of goodness in distribution system planning. To demonstrate its effect, the distributed expert system is implemented on basis of NASA's CLIPS and SUN's RPC and applied to the planning of distribution system in Taiwan. Test results indicate that the distributed expert system assists system planners in making an appropriate plan.

In this paper, we show that without any unproven assumption, there exists a "four" move blackbox simulation perfect zero-knowledge interactive proof system of computational ability for any random self-reducible relation R whose domain is in BPP, and that without any unproven assumption, there exists a "four" move blackbox simulation perfect zero-knowledge interactive proof system of knowledge on the prime factorization. These results are optimal in the light of the round complexity, because it is shown that if a relation R has a three move blackbox simulation (perfect) zero-knowledge interactive proof system of computational ability (or of knowledge), then there exists a probabilistic polynomial time algorithm that on input x ∈ {0, 1}*, outputs y such that (x, y)∈R with overwhelming probability if x ∈dom R, and outputs "⊥" with probability 1 if x dom R.

In this paper, the characteristics of microstrip lines near the edge of dielectric substrate are analyzed by improving the rectangular boundary division method. The numerical results indicate the changes of the characteristics of a microstrip line when the strip conductor is closely located to the edge. When the distance the dielectric substrate edge to the strip conductor is less than the thickness of dielectric substrate, the effects of the edge on the line characteristics are no longer negligible. The numerical results in this paper show high computation accuracy without increasing computation time. Our improvement is effective for the analysis of the microstrip lines both for the narrow strip conductor and the strip conductor close to the edge. The relative errors between the numerical results and the measured values are less than 1.2%.

In the field of computer vision the detection of edges in an image serves to simplify the date in the early stages, into a form which is more easily processed by the computer. But because of noise or due to the inherent weaknesses of the chosen edge detector, gaps or interruptions in the edges may be formed. In order for further processing to proceed with accuracy and confidence, these gaps must be filled or linked to form a more continuous edge. Proposed in this paper is a unique method of edge linking. This method consists of three steps, labelling, linking and merging. The procedure makes use of global information in the labelling process and local information with the use of templates in the linking and merging processes. As a result of the unique way in which the gaps between edge segments are filled, distortion of the edge image is kept minimal. One other advantage of the proposed edge linker is that it can be used in combination with different edge detection schemes. To show the effectiveness of the proposed method, comparisons are given. These include the linear feature extraction method of Zhou et.al., upon which the proposed method is based and also outputs from a method described by Nevatia.

In this paper, we propose a fuzzy Petri net model for a rule-based decision making system which contains uncertain conditions and vague rules. Using the transformation method introduced in the paper, one can obtain the fuzzy Petri net of the rule-based system. Since the fuzzy Petri net can be represented by some matrices, the algebraic form of a state equation of the fuzzy Petri net is systematically derived. Both forward and backward reasoning are performed by using the state equations. Since the proposed reasoning methods require only simple arithmetic operations under a parallel rule firing scheme, it is possible to perform real-time decision making with applications to control systems and diagnostic systems. The methodology presented is also applicable to classical (nonfuzzy) knowledge base systems if the nonfuzzy system is considered as a special case of a fuzzy system with truth values being equal to the extreme values only. Finally, an illustrative example of a rule-based decision making system is given for automobile engine diagnosis.

The purpose of this paper is to offer a modal logic which enables us symbolic reasoning about data, especially, fuzzy relations. For such a purpose, the present author provided some systems of modal fuzzy logic. As a continuous one of those previous works, a logic based on the graded modalities is proposed. After showing some properties of this logic, the decision procedure for this logic is given in the rectangle method.

In this paper, we consider a class of the languages that have (constant round) perfect zero-knowledge interactive proofs without assuming any complexity assumptions. Especially, we investigate the interactive protocol with the restricted prover who runs in probabilistic polynomial time and knows the complete factorization as a trapdoor information of the integer associated with the input. We give a condition of the existence of constant round perfect zero-knowledge interactive proofs without assuming any complexity assumptions. The bit commitment based on the quadratic residuosity has an important role in our protocol and the simulation is based on the technique developed by Bellare, Micali, and Ostrovsky in Ref. (9), so call double running process. However, the proof of perfect zero-knowledgeness needs a more powerful simulation technique. Our simulation extracts more knowledge, the complete factorization of the integer associated with the input, from a (cheating) verifier than Bellare-Micali-Ostrovsky's simulation does. Furthermore, our main result implies that Blum integer has a five move perfect zero-knowledge interactive proof without assuming any complexity assumptions. (All previous known zero-knowledge protocols for Blum integer required either unproven cryptographic assumptions or unbounded number of rounds of message exchange.)

The subject of the paper is to propose an O(|V|+|E|) algorithm for the 3-edge-connectivity augmentation problem (UW-3-ECA) defined by "Given an undirected graph G0=(V,E), find an edge set E of minimum cardinality such that the graph (V,EE ) (denoted as G0+E ) is 3-edge-connected, where each edge of E connects distinct vertices of V." Such a set E is called a solution to the problem. Let UW-3-ECA(S) (UW-3-ECA(M), respectively) denote UW-3-ECA in which G0+E is required to be simple (G0+E may have multiple edges). Note that we can assume that G0 is simple in UW-3-ECA(S). UW-3-ECA(M) is divided into two subproblems (1) and (2) as follows: (1) finding all k-edge-connected components of a given graph for every k3, and (2) determining a minimum set of edges whose addition to G0 result in a 3-edge-connected graph. Concerning the subproblem (1), we use an O(|V|+|E|) algorithm that has already been existing. The paper proposes an O(|V|+|E|) algorithm for the subproblem (2). Combining these algorithms makes an O(|V|+|E|) algorithm for finding a solution to UW-3-ECA(M). Furthermore, it is shown that a solution E to UW-3-ECA(M) is also a solution to UW-3-ECA(S) if |V|4, partly solving an open problem UW-k-ECA(S) that is a generalization of UW-3-ECA(S).

The concentration of the electric field at the edge of the electrode has been simulated in several types of flat DRAM cell capacitors with high permittivity dielectrics. The results indicated that the permittivity of the material surrounding the edge of the electrode as well as the geometrical structure affected the concentration of the electric field. The electric field strength was minimized and most evenly distributed by utilizing the structure in which the sidewall of the capacitor dielectric was terminated at the edge of the electrode by a low-dielectric constant insulator. High-precision fabrication of the capacitor's profile is required for the minimization and uniformity of the electric field.

In this paper, we propose an algorithm of O(|V|min{k,|V|,|A|}|A|) time complexity for finding all k-edge-connected components of a given digraph D=(V,A) and a positive integer k. When D is symmetric, incorporating a preprocessing reduces this time complexity to O(|A|+|V|2+|V|min{k,|V|}min{k|V|,|A|}), which is at most O(|A|+k2|V|2).

A theoretical method is required for prediction of mean field strength in land mobile radio systems, instead of the conventional empirical methods. Feasibility study of theoretical prediction using the ray-tracing method, was made in a 1.2GHz band for a model of a small-cell system. Theoretical values showed better agreement with the measured, when diffraction around the side edges of a building is taken into account. Comparison between mean field strengths in summer and winter suggested the seasonal variations in attenuation due to trees.

In general, the work on developing an expert system has relied on domain experts to provide all domain-specific knowledge. The method for acquiring knowledge directly from experts is inadequate in oriental medicine because it is hard to find an appropriate expert and the development cost becomes too high. Therefore, we have developed two effective methods for acquiring knowledge indirectly from sample cases. One is to refine a constructed knowledge base by using sample cases. The other is to train a neural network by using sample cases. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods, we have implemented two prototype systems; the Oriental Medicine Expert System (OMES) and the Oriental Medicine Neural Network (OMNN). These systems have been compared with the system with the knowledge base built directly by domain experts (OLDS). Among these systems, OMES are considered to be superior to other systems in terms of performances, development costs, and practicalness. In this paper, we present our methods, and describe our experimental and comparison results.

In this paper, we investigate the discrepancy between a serial version and a parallel version of zero-knowledge protocols, and clarify the information "leaked" in the parallel version, which is not zero-knowledge unlike the case of the serial version. We consider two sides: one negative and the other positive in the parallel version of zero-knowledge protocols, especially of the Fiat-Shamir scheme.

In this paper, we investigate the round complexity of zero-knowledge interactive proof systems of possession of knowledge, and mainly show that if a relation R has a three move blackbox simulation zero-knowledge interactive proof system of possession of knowledge, then there exists a probabilistic polynomial time algorithm that on input x{0,1}*, outputs y such that (x,y)R with overwhelming probability if xdom R, and outputs "" with probability 1 if x dom R. The result above can not be generalized to zero-knowledge interactive proof systems of possession of knowledge with more than four moves, because it is known that there exists a "four" move blackbox simulation perfect zero-knowledge interactive proof system of possession of knowledge for a nontrivial relation R.