Tomasz Wójtowicz

This article describes the possible course of the battle of Taiwan. The paper presents the Chinese policy towards Taiwan, conclusions drawn from the war games conducted by the Pentagon, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and civilian think tanks, the military potential of both sides, and the battle scenario. During the actual research, studies and articles published in Forbes, Business Insider, Taiwan News, Lowy Institute, War on the Rocks, NBC News, China Power, Military Times, Reuters, and Daily Guardian, along with reports of think tanks such as the Atlantic Council and RAND, reports of the US Congress, and reports of Military Ballance were used. The Chinese Invasion Threat: Taiwan’s Defense and American Strategy in Asia, a book written by Ian Easton, turned out to be a particularly useful source of knowledge. According to the author of this article, a „forceful solution” for the Taiwanese issue by Beijing is possible in the future and the Western world should seriously analyze its possible course. This is evidenced by numerous statements of Chinese politicians, the desire to change the current global balance of power, the continuous growth of China’s economic power, the expansion of the PLA’s power projection capabilities in terms of an invasion of the „rogue province”, and regular war games and violations of the Taiwanese air defense identification zone. If there was a battle of Taiwan, from the point of view of the People’s Republic of China, it would be crucial to isolate the island, to quickly eliminate the enemy’s anti‑aircraft and anti‑missile defenses by means of missile and cyberattacks, to paralyze the command system, to gain air superiority, and then to land on the beaches from which operations would be then carried out inland. From the point of view of the Taiwan Armed Forces, the most important thing would be to survive the first days of massive air and missile attacks, to disperse their forces, and then to attack the enemy by exploring its weaknesses, i.e., shooting down selected planes and helicopters, sinking ships in the Taiwan Strait, interrupting supply lines, and then inflicting as much damage as possible during the ground combat.

This paper presents an optimal scheduling solution for a case of agents sharing a resource. The amount of resource can not satisfy all agents at once and in case of runout there is a penalty. Each agent randomly toggle its state between requiring and not requiring the resource. Using the knowledge of previous state and probability of change, the scheduling algorithm is able to calculate optimal number of concuring agents for one turn, that minimizes possibility of collision yet provides as much throughput as possible. Several different scheduling strategies are tested. The optimal solution adapts automatically to the value of probability of change. Further experiments show that optimality is retained if only the average probability of a set of agents is known. A case of practical application is provided.

The following paper discusses the topic of edge detection in X-ray hand images. It criticises the existing solution by highlighting a design fault, which is a carelessly chosen function and then proposes a way to eliminate the fault by replacing it with a better suited function. The search for this function and its results are also discussed in this paper. It also presents the aspect of pre- and postprocessing through filtering as another improvement in edge detection.

The approach of evolutionary games like prisoner’s dilemma, among others, is based on a consistent strategy. We propose an experimentally verified system where cooperation can arise out of two simple factors: mutation and inheritance. This system has a social dilemma property and allows each agent to set its own desired number of participants. There are two essential mechanisms: fluctuation through which mutation leads to cooperation, and natural selection which tends to promote cheaters and therefore disrupts the cooperation. It is shown in numerical simulations that the interplay between both mechanisms leads to an equilibrium and that no intentional strategies are necessary to establish and sustain cooperation. Thus, starting from a population of non-cooperating agents, natural evolution can end with a population composed of cooperating groups with the mean group size determined by the fluctuation rate and the pay-off function. A thorough analytical explanation of numerical results is provided.

The author describes an interesting history, architecture and management of the palace in the revival-gothic style in Jabłonowo Pomorskie. The benefactor of this palace was Stefan Narzymski and the architect August Fryderyk Stüler. The palace was built between 1854 and 1859. At the moment there is a convent located in this building.

In the present paper, the case of a database of scientific articles is described. There can be observed the quantitative effects of the increasing strength of cooperation between scholars. It is manifested in time-related features changes of the numbers distribution of a single co-authors’ article. The distribution of the number of co-authors of an article recorded in the database evolves with time from a profile with no more than one author to a profile with several authors. A social dilemma model is proposed to explain the dynamics of changes in the distribution of the number of co-authors. The most successful strategy of the three considered alternative strategies of cooperation is selected.