Inductive program synthesis, from input/output examples, can provide an opportunity to automatically create programs from scratch without presupposing the algorithmic form of the solution. For induction of general programs with loops (as opposed to loop-free programs, or synthesis for domain-specific languages), the state of the art is at the level of introductory programming assignments. Most problems that require algorithmic subtlety, such as fast sorting, have remained out of reach without the benefit of significant problem-specific background knowledge. A key challenge is to identify cues that are available to guide search towards correct looping programs. We present MAKESPEARE, a simple delayed-acceptance hillclimbing method that synthesizes low-level looping programs from input/output examples. During search, delayed acceptance bypasses small gains to identify significantly-improved stepping stone programs that tend to generalize and enable further progress. The method performs well on a set of established benchmarks, and succeeds on the previously unsolved "Collatz Numbers" program synthesis problem. Additional benchmarks include the problem of rapidly sorting integer arrays, in which we observe the emergence of comb sort (a Shell sort variant that is empirically fast). MAKESPEARE has also synthesized a record-setting program on one of the puzzles from the TIS-100 assembly language programming game.

Governance mechanisms facilitate sustainability transitions by ensuring that people are engaging in socially and environmentally sound practice. This paper analyses the history of the New Zealand wine industry over the past twenty years to trace how agricultural actors handle regulatory and voluntary modes of environmental governance and navigate between them. The empirical basis for the paper comprises 22 semi-structured interviews with industry actors addressing the 'Sustainable Winegrowing New Zealand' programme. This qualitative methodology facilitated the collection of historical data as well as the interrogation of the meanings interviewees attributed to particular events, practices or behaviours. A narrative analysis examined how interviewees situated themselves in relation with the sustainability programme and their wider environment. The research identifies the key moments that lead the industry to ground its environmentalism in markets, and to coordinate wine production practice through associated auditing. The historical development of the programme suggests that this was achieved through the industry's wholesale adoption of what had been a voluntary programme. The analysis also reveals that diverse actors involved in New Zealand wine production refer to similar intertwining narratives about the programme that demonstrate a shift from a voluntary to a de facto compulsory scheme. We argue that actors have acquiesced to the expansion of the programme, allowing it to shape wine production in New Zealand. In this context, winegrowers and winemakers relate to the sustainability programme as simultaneously a regulatory and a market-motivated form of governance. The findings provide insight to how collective market strategies paired with sustainability assessments can create a new kind of governance mechanism that bridges economic and social spheres. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Our review concludes that organic standards need to account for a broader set of criteria in order to retain claims to ‘sustainability’. Measurements of the ecological, economic and social outcomes from over 96 kiwifruit, sheep/beef and dairy farms in New Zealand between 2004 and 2012 by The Agricultural Research Group on Sustainability (ARGOS) project showed some enhanced ecosystem services from organic agriculture that will assist a “land-sharing” approach for sustainable land management. However, the efficiency of provisioning services is reduced in organic systems and this potentially undermines a “land-sparing” strategy to secure food security and ecosystem services. Other aspects of the farm operation that are not considered in the organic standards sometimes had just as much or even a greater effect on ecosystem services than restriction of chemical inputs and synthetic fertilisers. An organic farming version of the New Zealand Sustainability Dashboard will integrate organic standards and wider agricultural best practice into a broad and multidimensional sustainability assessment framework and package of learning tools. There is huge variation in performance of farms within a given farming system. Therefore improving ecosystem services depends as much on locally tuned learning and adjustments of farm practice on individual farms as on uptake of organic or Integrated Management farming system protocols.

To adjust to a world that is changing socially, environmentally and economically, farmers will need to farm sustainably and be adaptive, entrepreneurial and resilient. They may have to farm in ways that are unthinkable to them. We suggest that supporting and encouraging farmers’ social and environmental ‘breadth of view’ or awareness of the impact of their farms on the wellbeing of themselves, their families, communities and the wider world environmentally and socially may lead to them being more likely to adapt and change their practices. By calculating attitudinal indices of social and environmental breadth of view, propensity to adapt, and importance placed on financial criteria from a farmer survey we were able to link the way these qualities interacted to affect farmers’ practices and actions, through comparison with on-farm data collected from farmers in the ARGOS program. Using a ‘good farming’ perspective to interpret what we found, we demonstrate how breadth of view informs farmer’s actions and practices in two ways: to conform or to change. Farmers with the broadest breadth of view and the highest propensity to adapt, were more entrepreneurial through adjusting their practices more to the world in which they found themselves and were able to farm financially successfully and environmentally sustainably.

We present ULSA, a novel stochastic local search algorithm for random binary constraint satisfaction problems (CSP). ULSA is many times faster than the prior state of the art on a widely-studied suite of random CSP benchmarks. Unlike the best previous methods for these benchmarks, ULSA is a simple unweighted method that does not require dynamic adaptation of weights or penalties. ULSA obtains new record best solutions satisfying 99 of 100 variables in the challenging frb100-40 benchmark instance.

Game playing has been a core domain of artificial intelligence research since the beginnings of the field. Game playing provides clearly defined arenas within which computational approaches can be readily compared to human expertise through head-to-head competition and other benchmarks. Game playing research has identified several simple core algorithms that provide successful foundations, with development focused on the challenges of defeating human experts in specific games. Key developments include minimax search in chess, machine learning from self-play in backgammon, and Monte Carlo tree search in Go. These approaches have generalized successfully to additional games. While computers have surpassed human expertise in a wide variety of games, open challenges remain and research focuses on identifying and developing new successful algorithmic foundations. WIREs Cogn Sci 2014, 5:193-205. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1278 CONFLICT OF INTEREST: The author has declared no conflicts of interest for this article. For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.

This work was funded by the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology (Contract Number AGRB0301), with additional financial assistance from: ZESPRI International Ltd., Fonterra, a meat processing company, Merino New Zealand Inc., COKA (Certified Organic Kiwifruit Growers Association) and in-kind support from Te Rūnanga O Ngāi Tahu. Smaller projects have been funded by the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry’s Sustainable Farming Fund and Meat and Wool NZ.

This work was funded by the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology (Contract Number AGRB0301).

multi-armed bandit episode consists of n trials, each allowing selection of one of K arms, resulting in payoff from a distribution over [0,1] associated with that arm. We assume contextual side information is available at the start of the episode. This context enables an arm predictor to identify possible favorable arms, but predictions may be imperfect so that they need to be combined with further exploration during the episode. Our setting is an alternative to classical multi-armed bandits which provide no contextual side information, and is also an alternative to contextual bandits which provide new context each individual trial. Multi-armed bandits with episode context can arise naturally, for example in computer Go where context is used to bias move decisions made by a multi-armed bandit algorithm. The UCB1 algorithm for multi-armed bandits achieves worst-case regret bounded by O(√(Knlog(n))) . We seek to improve this using episode context, particularly in the case where K is large. Using a predictor that places weight M i > 0 on arm i with weights summing to 1, we present the PUCB algorithm which achieves regret O(1/M_∗√(nlog(n))) where M ∗ is the weight on the optimal arm. We illustrate the behavior of PUCB with small simulation experiments, present extensions that provide additional capabilities for PUCB, and describe methods for obtaining suitable predictors for use with PUCB.

Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) methods have had recent success in games, planning, and optimization. MCTS uses results from rollouts to guide search; a rollout is a path that descends the tree with a randomized decision at each ply until reaching a leaf. MCTS results can be strongly influenced by the choice of appropriate policy to bias the rollouts. Most previous work on MCTS uses static uniform random or domain-specific policies. We describe a new MCTS method that dynamically adapts the rollout policy during search, in deterministic optimization problems. Our starting point is Cazenave's original Nested Monte Carlo Search (NMCS), but rather than navigating the tree directly we instead use gradient ascent on the rollout policy at each level of the nested search. We benchmark this new Nested Rollout Policy Adaptation (NRPA) algorithm and examine its behavior. Our test problems are instances of Crossword Puzzle Construction and Morpion Solitaire. Over moderate time scales NRPA can substantially improve search efficiency compared to NMCS, and over longer time scales NRPA improves upon all previous published solutions for the test problems. Results include a new Morpion Solitaire solution that improves upon the previous human-generated record that had stood for over 30 years.

Farmers produce products for markets that demand food safety and environmental sustainability, while working in a world challenged by a changing climate and decreasing water and energy resources. To meet these challenges they need to adapt and change their farming practices. We argue that studying farmer orientation from the perspective of ‘good farming’ offers an improved understanding of change in farm practices. In this article we develop the concept of ‘breadth of view’ to account for how farmers view the impact of their farming practices on social and environmental wellbeing, We then link this cultural capital to their self ascribed adaptive propensity and financial emphasis. Factor and cluster analysis of farmer survey data identified four clusters of farmers each with different combinations of levels of cultural capital to do with social and environmental breath of view, adaptive propensity and financial emphasis. By considering the sheep/beef farmers from the ARGOS programme within these survey clusters we were able to associate the overall attitudinal qualities of each cluster with on-farm environmental and financial practices and outcomes. One cluster, which had the highest adaptive propensity and the highest social and environmental breadth of view achieved some higher environmental and economic outcomes on their farms. Using our knowledge of the farmers in this cluster we were able to ascertain the nature of their adaptation to demonstrate how they did things that were unthinkable to other farmers. The results are interpreted in terms of how breadth of view may have different effects, that is, be either a source of new ideas or a driver of conformity, and also to show how farmers may be able to achieve the unthinkable, suggesting it is possible for farmers to farm environmentally, socially and economically sustainably in quite different ways.

The Agricultural Research Group on Sustainability (ARGOS), a transdisciplinary research programme funded by New Zealand's Public Good Science Fund and business organisations interested in primary production, aims to improve the resilience and sustainability of New Zealand agriculture by comparing organic, integrat ed and conventionally managed farms and orchards. Researchers from ARGOS write of the programme's context, research design and major results, but especially they share the highs and lows of their experiences of working in a team made up of researchers from farm management, economics, ecology and social science, in the process of beco ming transdisciplinary. These experiences are interpreted through the lens of Bourdieu's Theory of Practice to demonstrate how researchers respond to working in a field, transdisciplinarity, in which they do not know the 'rules of the game' and which, in fact, may not yet have rules. Despite frequently referring to the contestation th at occurs in this situation of challenges to identity and making meaning, this is a programme that through continuing negotiation has been adapted to move into its seventh year. As such those who are working or about to work in similar programmes can take heart. If they are having difficulties and disagreements - this is a 'normal' experie nce, to be expected and celebrated as part of a growing and creative process. It does not mean that the transdisciplinary research endeavour should be abandoned but that it requires structural support frameworks at both international and research institute level for a 'space' in which it can ha ppen more effectively.

Within the political economy of agriculture and agrofood literatures there are examples of approaches that reject simple dichotomies between alternatives and the mainstream. In line with such approaches, we challenge the assumption that alternative agriculture, and its attendant improved environmental practices, alternative management styles, less intensive approaches, and better approaches to animal and ecosystem welfare, is the only source of agricultural sustainability. This article uses national farm-survey results for New Zealand's sheep and beef, dairy, and horticulture sectors to examine conventional farmers, measure their assessments of farming practices, and assess their environmental orientation. Analysis identifies a proenvironmental cluster of farmers in each sector characterized by a higher environmental-orientation score and distinct ratings of other farm practices queried in the Survey. We interpret the results in terms of the exposure of different agricultural sectors to the effects of market-based, audited, best-practice schemes. The presence of shades of "greenness" among conventional farmers has important implications for environmental management and for our understanding of the various and complex pathways toward the greening of agrofood systems.

This work was funded by the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology (Contract Number AGRB0301). ARGOS also acknowledges financial assistance from: ZESPRI Innovation Company, Fonterra, Merino New Zealand Inc., COKA (Certified Organic Kiwifruit Growers Association) and in-kind support from Te Runanga O Ngāi Tahu.

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image sizeKeywords: agricultural scienceagricultural historybiological economiesknowledge productionrural geographysocial science methodologiestransdisciplinary researchtransformative research

1 The Forum section contains short opinion articles on topics within the scope of the New Zealand Journal of Agricultural Research. Forum articles are not refereed, and editing is limited to style matters. They should be no more than the equivalent of 2500 words including references. Articles commenting on a specific paper will be referred to the author(s) of that paper for right of reply before publication. Forum articles should not be cited as scientific papers.

Intensification of New Zealand agricultural practices is ail ongoing and accelerating process which potentially threatens the environment. biodiversity and even the sustainability of agricultural production. However, neither the exact nature of this threat nor the extent of its impact has received adequate analysis. There is clear evidence that agricultural intensification has degraded aquatic biodiversity, but there is a critical lack of research and monitoring of robust indicators of terrestrial biodiversity in New Zealand production landscapes. Therefore. we call only infer a generalised likelihood that intensification has also reduced terrestrial biodiversity and agro-ecosystem resilience. It is unknown whether biodiversity and ecological services provided by the actual land growing crops, pasture Or wood fibre are degrading because of intensification. Increased use of ecological Subsidies (nutrient and energy inputs) may have compensated, at least in part, for the increased rate of food production (nutrient and energy outputs). Lasting practical Solutions to enhance sustainability call only be identified by long-term transdisciplinary research of ecological disturbance in agro-ecosystems. Working with intensification to identify environmental and social gains at the same tu-ne as capturing economic efficiencies is more likely to Support biodiversity than simply attempting to stern or reverse intensification. A change in world view of both rural and Urban dwellers, from the predominant philosophy that allocates land to either preservation or production to one that promotes Sustainable land-Use practices that integrate extractive resource use With conservation, is the key to mitigating impacts of agricultural intensification ill modified landscapes.