Ancient and Indigenous Mathematics Research Paper

Ancient and Indigenous Mathematics - Research Paper Example However, a massive and countervailing pressure was the culmination of European supremacy in the shape of political control in large areas of Asia and Africa. Out of this supremacy, the ideology of European pre-eminence emerged and permeated a wide range of economic and social activities and also enhanced the unique role of Europe in providing the spirit for science discovery (Peat, 2006). This paper is going to discuss how mathematics has developed through ancient times and some of the factors that have led to the development of modern mathematics and also address the role of mathematics in other disciplines. Many social needs require numbers and calculations. Therefore, mathematics automatically came into play with the evolution of social systems. A well organized operational system is required to handle numbers and calculations. Nonetheless, as fascinating as the basic theories of counting may be, the origins of mathematics include more than just counting, enumeration and arithmetic. The human needs that instigated mankind’s initial efforts at mathematics were: calculations, counting and measurement (Kline, 2012). For example, an inheritance could not be distributed certain basics of division are known or a temple cannot be built if certain facts about squares and volumes are known. Mathematics was born from practical needs such as the ones above. Others argue that the central part of indigenous mathematics is based upon two simple questions: How much and how many? It is a convincing argument that long before our early ancestors had need to count their cattle or sheep, their unsophisticatedly organized social systems had simple rituals based on priority and rank. Also, according to Breasted (1988), it is evident that some socialized animals of diverse groups such as the red deer and baboon have some elementary sense of order of precedence, referred to

Artificial Intelligence Research Paper and Proposal

Artificial Intelligence and Proposal - Research Paper Example [Liebowitz, J. 2001. p.1-6] A research by Kaminka and Pynadath (2002. p.83-91) presented techniques of on-line monitoring of teams using a method of "overhearing" whereby their communication exchanges during business transactions are captured in computer systems and the learning of the agents are captured under three categories - No Learning, On-Line Learning and Using Previously Learned Predictions. They called the system as "Overseer" that can be effectively used to compare the performance gaps between novice agents and expert agents. The system could be used for performance evaluations of individuals as well as groups carrying out business transactions in any domain of the world. The researchers deployed two different hierarchies in the system - A team hierarchy and a plan hierarchy. The team hierarchy comprises of people fitting into the roles required to deliver tasks defined in the plan hierarchy. Hence, every individual in a role is expected to "execute a plan". They modeled the ground operations of an international airport whereby the human agents were allowed to query about the status of a plan and the future course of the plan in progress thus dealing with obstacles coming on the way of a plan. They querying was normally carried out by people in higher hierarchies and the plan reporting carried out by people in lower hierarchies. The learning about steps taken for plan executions were recorded in a plan library. They developed a probabilistic model of quantitative evaluation of the plan by plotting a time series of the plan state variables whereby all plans are represented by a set of Boolean random variables in such a way that the variable is true only if an agent is able to execute it at time "t". Thereafter the performance "belief" about an agent was plotted as a probability distribution with Markov property over all the variables within the set and was termed as Dynamic Belief Network (DBN). The start of a plan is overheard through initiation messages by the reporter and te rmination of plan overheard through