This "Ethical Trap" Is for Roboticists, Not Robots: On the Issue of Artificial Agent Ethical Decision-Making.

In this paper we address the question of when a researcher is justified in describing his or her artificial agent as demonstrating ethical decision-making. The paper is motivated by the amount of research being done that attempts to imbue artificial agents with expertise in ethical decision-making. It seems clear that computing systems make decisions, in that they make choices between different options; and there is scholarship in philosophy that addresses the distinction between ethical decision-making and general decision-making.

AxML: a fast program for sequential and parallel phylogenetic tree calculations based on the maximum likelihood method.

Heuristics for the NP-complete problem of calculating the optimal phylogenetic tree for a set of aligned rRNA sequences based on the maximum likelihood method are computationally expensive. In most existing algorithms the tree evaluation and branch length optimization functions, calculating the likelihood value for each tree topology examined in the search space, account for the greatest part of overall computation time. This paper introduces AxML, a program derived from fastDNAml, incorporating a fast topology evaluation function.