TY - JOUR AB - The search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (SETI) has been performed principally as a one-way survey, listening of radio frequencies across the Milky Way and other galaxies. However, scientists have engaged in an active messaging only rarely. This suggests the simple rationale that if other civilizations exist and take a similar approach to ours, namely listening but not broadcasting, the result is a silent universe. A simple game theoretical model, the prisoner's dilemma, explains this situation: each player (civilization) can passively search (defect), or actively search and broadcast (cooperate). In order to maximize the payoff (or, equivalently, minimize the risks) the best strategy is not to broadcast. In fact, the active search has been opposed on the basis that it might be dangerous to expose ourselves. However, most of these ideas have not been based on objective arguments, and ignore accounting of the possible gains and losses. Thus, the question stands: should we perform an active search? I develop a game-theoretical framework where civilizations can be of different types, and explicitly apply it to a situation where societies are either interested in establishing a two-way communication or belligerent and in urge to exploit ours. The framework gives a quantitative solution (a mixed-strategy), which is how frequent we should perform the active SETI. This frequency is roughly proportional to the inverse of the risk, and can be extremely small. However, given the immense amount of stars being scanned, it supports active SETI. The model is compared with simulations, and the possible actions are evaluated through the San Marino scale, measuring the risks of messaging. AU - Vladar, Harold ID - 2917 IS - 1 JF - International Journal of Astrobiology TI - The game of active search for extra terrestrial intelligence Breaking the Great Silence VL - 12 ER - TY - JOUR AB - We have selected problems that may not yet be well known, but have the potential to push the research in interesting directions. In particular, we state problems that do not require specific knowledge outside the standard circle of ideas in discrete geometry. Despite the relatively simple statements, these problems are related to current research and their solutions are likely to require new ideas and approaches. We have chosen problems from different fields to make this short paper attractive to a wide range of specialists. AU - Herbert Edelsbrunner AU - Ivanov, Alexander AU - Karasev, Roman ID - 2911 JF - Automatic Control and Computer Sciences TI - Open problems in discrete and computational geometry VL - in print ER - TY - CONF AB - In this paper we investigate k-submodular functions. This natural family of discrete functions includes submodular and bisubmodular functions as the special cases k = 1 and k = 2 respectively. In particular we generalize the known Min-Max-Theorem for submodular and bisubmodular functions. This theorem asserts that the minimum of the (bi)submodular function can be found by solving a maximization problem over a (bi)submodular polyhedron. We define a k-submodular polyhedron, prove a Min-Max-Theorem for k-submodular functions, and give a greedy algorithm to construct the vertices of the polyhedron. AU - Huber, Anna AU - Kolmogorov, Vladimir ID - 2930 TI - Towards minimizing k-submodular functions VL - 7422 ER - TY - GEN AB - This paper addresses the problem of approximate MAP-MRF inference in general graphical models. Following [36], we consider a family of linear programming relaxations of the problem where each relaxation is specified by a set of nested pairs of factors for which the marginalization constraint needs to be enforced. We develop a generalization of the TRW-S algorithm [9] for this problem, where we use a decomposition into junction chains, monotonic w.r.t. some ordering on the nodes. This generalizes the monotonic chains in [9] in a natural way. We also show how to deal with nested factors in an efficient way. Experiments show an improvement over min-sum diffusion, MPLP and subgradient ascent algorithms on a number of computer vision and natural language processing problems. AU - Kolmogorov, Vladimir AU - Schoenemann, Thomas ID - 2928 T2 - arXiv TI - Generalized sequential tree-reweighted message passing ER - TY - GEN AU - Vladimir Kolmogorov ID - 2929 TI - The power of linear programming for valued CSPs: a constructive characterization ER -