[Photo of Bob Hearn]

Robert Aubrey Hearn

I am currently a research assistant professor in the Neukom Institute for Computational Science at Dartmouth College. I recently completed my Ph.D. in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT. Prior to that I spent several years in the software industry, where I co-wrote the popular program ClarisWorks.

Research

I work with Rick Granger in the Brain Engineering Lab. My primary research lies in building computational models of brain function, towards the ultimate goal of recreating human intelligence, cognition, and emotion in software. (Traditionally this endeavor would be called "artificial intelligence", but that term has now acquired a rather different meaning.)

Current projects attempt to achieve these emergent, though engineered, capabilities by integrating models of several systems, particulary cortex, basal ganglia, amygdala, and hippocampus. Previous work in the Granger lab has developed extensive abstract computational models of many of these systems. Now it is time to put the pieces together.

I am also guided in this work by my previous experience with Marvin Minsky's Society of Mind theory of intelligence. While at MIT I built the first system that explicitly implemented many of the Society of Mind ideas.

I also study the computational complexity of games and puzzles. I have developed a general game model of computation, called Constraint Logic. This was the subject of my Ph.D. thesis, and will appear in book form this fall, from AK Peters. One of the more surprising discoveries in this area is that there are undecidable games with finitely many positions. Strangely, perfect play in such games corresponds directly with arbitrary computation on a Turing machine with an infinite tape!

Here is my CV as of February 2008.

Theses

Publications

Demaine, E. and R. A. Hearn. Constraint Logic: A Uniform Framework for Modeling Computation as Games. In Proceedings of the 23rd Annual IEEE Conference on Computational Complexity, June 2008, to appear.

Demaine, E. D. and R. A Hearn. Playing Games with Algorithms: Algorithmic Combinatorial Game Theory. In R. J. Nowakowski, editor, \emph{Games of No Chance 3}, 2008, to appear.

Hearn, R. A. Amazons, Konane, and Cross Purposes are PSPACE-complete. In R. J. Nowakowski, editor, Games of No Chance 3, 2008, to appear.

Demaine, E., M. Demaine, R. Fleischer, R. A. Hearn, and T. von Oertzen. The complexity of the Dyson Telescopes Puzzle. In R. J. Nowakowski, editor, Games of No Chance 3, 2008, to appear.

Granger, R. H. and R. A. Hearn. Models of Thalamocortical System. Scholarpedia, p. 24386, 2007.

Hearn, R. A. Tipover is NP-complete. Mathematical Intelligencer, 2006, 28(3), pages 10-14.

Hearn, R. A. and E. Demaine. PSPACE-completeness of sliding-block puzzles and other problems through the nondeterministic constraint logic model of computation. Theoretical Computer Science, 343(1-2):72-96, October 2005. Special issue "Game Theory Meets Theoretical Computer Science".

Hearn, R. A. The complexity of sliding block puzzles and plank puzzles. In Tribute to a Mathemagician, pages 173-183. A K Peters, 2004.

Hearn, R. A., Erik Demaine, and Greg Frederickson. Hinged dissection of polygons is hard. In Proc. 15th Canad. Conf. Comput. Geom., pages 98-102, 2003.

Demaine, E., R. A. Hearn, and M. Hoffmann. Push-2-f is PSPACE-complete. In Proceedings of the 14th Canadian Conference on Computational Geometry (CCCG 2002), pages 31-35, Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada, August 12-14 2002.

Hearn, R. A., and E. Demaine. The nondeterministic constraint logic model of computation: Reductions and applications. In Peter Widmayer, Francisco Triguero Ruiz, Rafael Morales Bueno, Matthew Hennessy, Stephan Eidenbenz, and Ricardo Conejo, editors, ICALP, volume 2380 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 401-413. Springer, 2002.

Professional Work

Prior to entering grad school I spent several years in the real world, during which I co-wrote the Macintosh program ClarisWorks. Before that I worked on some less well-known software, such as TopDraw and AppleWorks GS. After ClarisWorks I was CTO at Gobe, where I worked on a novel constraint-based programming paradigm.

Other Interests

Family

I am married to Liz Hearn. She is an assistant professor in the Earth and Ocean Sciences department at The University of British Columbia. (Thus, I'm bicoastal.) She runs big hairy earthquake simulations.

My parents have a page with some family history.

Our cats Grimalkin and Euclid were born two days before we were married, in 1987. Both of them almost, but not quite, made it to our 20th anniversary. We miss them.

Contact Information