Ant colony optimization, which is one of the metaheuristics imitating real ant foraging behavior, is an effective method to find a solution for the traveling salesman problem. The rank-based ant system has been proposed as a developed version of the fundamental model AS of ACO. In the ASrank, since only ant agents that have found one of some excellent solutions are let to regulate the pheromone, the pheromone concentrates on a specific route. As a result, although the ASrank can find (...) a relatively good solution in a short time, it has the disadvantage of being prone falling into a local solution because the pheromone concentrates on a specific route. This problem seems to come from the loss of diversity in route selection according to the rapid accumulation of pheromones to the specific routes. Some ACO models, not just the ASrank, also suffer from this problem of loss of diversity in route selection. It can be considered that the diversity of solutions as well as the selection of solutions is an important factor in the solution system by swarm intelligence such as ACO. In this paper, to solve this problem, we introduce the ant system using individual memories aiming to improve the ability to solve TSP while maintaining the diversity of the behavior of each ant. We apply the existing ACO algorithms and ASIM to some TSP benchmarks and compare the ability to solve TSP. (shrink)

On 6 August 1945, I was exposed to radiation in Hiroshima during the atomic bombing. At that time I was 15 years old, a third-year junior high school student, and working at a factory in Hiroshima under the wartime student mobilization plan. A total of 201 people from my school (13 teachers and 188 students) were killed outright in the bombing. I narrowly escaped death, but suffered from radiation sickness for many years afterwards. At one point, my white blood cell (...) count dropped sharply, endangering my life.When I chose painting as my vocation, I decided to put on canvas my prayer for world peace that stems from my experience in Hiroshima. In 1959, I painted Arrival of Buddhism, a picture depicting the 17-year-long journey to India of Xuanzang (600–664), a Chinese priest during the Tang Dynasty, in search of enlightenment. This work made my name known as a painter among the general public. (shrink)

We show that any relational generic structure whose theory has finite closure and amalgamation over closed sets is stable CM-trivial with weak elimination of imaginaries.

We show that any relational generic structure whose theory has finite closure and amalgamation over closed sets is stable CM-trivial with weak elimination of imaginaries.

In this paper, we examine some of the ways in which Koizumi Junichiro took advantage of changes in television news to win the 2001 Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) presidential election and become prime minister of Japan. Koizumi adopted a strategy of political populism to increase his exposure in the media and develop a public reputation. Changes in the LDP selection procedure, in combination with long-term social and economic change and political reform, meant that the media mattered more to his campaign (...) than had previously been the case. We use data from the Japan Election Study II (JES II) to show that the effects of Koizumi' media-driven popularity and style of politics reversed the LDP' electoral fortunes in the Upper House Election in 2001. (shrink)

This short note analyzes how the public in Japan evaluates the performance of the cabinet and the two major parties, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and the Democratic Party of Japan (DP), and their impacts on the 2000 House of Representatives election held on 25 June.

One year ago the Japanese people pinned their hopes on Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi. The figure shows public support ratings for the Koizumi cabinet as measured by periodic JiJi opinion surveys: He enjoyed a stellar 72.8% support rate immediately after taking office, and this climbed even higher to break the 78.4% mark the following month. Compared with the dismal 9.6% support for the cabinet of his predecessor, Mori Yoshirô (April 2000–April 2001), right before he bowed out, these sky-high numbers make (...) it clear just how much faith the people were placing in the new administration. (shrink)

On 30 June 1994 the Social Democratic Party of Japan (SDPJ, formerly the Japan Socialist Party) joined its historic enemy, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), to form a coalition government in a Japanese equivalent of Italy's . Competition between the conservative LDP and the progressive socialists had defined the Japanese party system since 1955. In this paper we analyze voter reactions to this and other confusing events surrounding the end of the LDP's 38-year dominance. We find, first, that the Japanese (...) electorate was able to make sense of these events. The political space reflected in public opinion mapped the political space reflected in the mass media remarkably well. Secondly, our findings support the idea that attitudes toward political parties are endogenous to the political process: strategic moves by political actors alter the political space within which they maneuver. Coalitions of strange bedfellows force voters to revise their perceptions of political space and reevaluate their attitudes toward the actors involved. Strange bedfellows seemed less strange, friendlier after they had been seen in bed together. (shrink)

Continuing work of Baldwin and Shi 1), we study non-ω-saturated generic structures of the ab initio Hrushovski construction with amalgamation over closed sets. We show that they are CM-trivial with weak elimination of imaginaries. Our main tool is a new characterization of non-forking in these theories.