Game playing is a powerful metaphor that fits many situations where interaction between autonomous agents plays a central role. Numerous tasks in computer science, such as design, synthesis, verification, testing, query evaluation, planning, etc. can be formulated in game-theoretic terms. Viewing them abstractly as games reveals the...

Any folklorist who saw the 1998 Columbia Pictures film Urban Legend will probably remember the library scene for its depiction of one aspect of folklore research. In this scene the beautiful student Natalie (played by Alicia Witt) suspects that recent campus mayhem was inspired by urban legends, the same kind of stories...

People often ask me why I chose to publish this work. Primarily, this book was motivated by my experience in industry after having been in the academic world for many years. We often hear about the need to bridge the gap between industry and academia, but one can easily intellectually understand something without having experienced it...

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A few years ago, after having meandered around the Web's nooks and crannies for quite a while, I got this sudden urge to have my own home page. "Sheesh," I thought to myself, "All these people are doing this wild Web stuff that just seems so, well, cool. I want in!" So I scoured the Web and bookstores for information on...