Presents a broad examination of the nature of virtual worlds and the potential they provide in managing and expressing information practices through that medium, grounding information professionals and students of new media in the fundamental elements of virtual worlds and online gaming. The book details the practical issues in finding and using information in virtual environments and presents a general theory of librarianship as it relates to virtual gaming worlds. It is encompassed by a set of best practice methods that libraries can effectively execute in their own environments, meeting the needs of this new generation of library user, and explores ways in which information literacy can be approached in virtual worlds. Final chapters examine how conventional information evaluation skills work falls short in virtual worlds online. Maps out areas of good practice and technique for information professionals and librarians serving in virtual communities Provides a clear foundation with appropriate theory for understanding information in virtual worlds Treats virtual worlds as ‘real environments’ and observes the behaviour of actors within them

This book aims to present an information-theoretical approach to thermodynamics and its generalisations. On the one hand, it generalises the concept of `information thermodynamics' to that of `information dynamics' in order to stress applications outside thermal phenomena. On the other hand, it is a synthesis of the dynamics of state change and the theory of complexity, which provide a common framework to treat both physical and nonphysical systems together. Both classical and quantum systems are discussed, and two appendices are included to explain principal definitions and some important aspects of the theory of Hilbert spaces and operator algebras. The concept of higher-order temperatures is explained and applied to biological and linguistic systems. The theory of open systems is presented in a new, much more general form. Audience: This volume is intended mainly for theoretical and mathematical physicists, but also for mathematicians, experimental physicists, physical chemists, theoretical biologists, communication engineers, and all those interested in entropy and open systems. It can also be recommended as a supplementary text.

In this book we develop various mathematical models of information dynamics, I -dynamics (including the process of thinking), based on methods of classical and quantum physics. The main aim of our investigations is to describe mathematically the phenomenon of consciousness. We would like to realize a kind of Newton-Descartes program (corrected by the lessons of statistical and quantum mechanics) for information processes. Starting from the ideas of Newton and Descartes, in physics there was developed an adequate description of the dynamics of material systems. We would like to develop an analogous mathematical formalism for information and, in particular, mental processes. At the beginning of the 21st century it is clear that it would be impossible to create a deterministic model for general information processes. A deterministic model has to be completed by a corresponding statistical model of information flows and, in particular, flows of minds. It might be that such an information statistical model should have a quantum-like structure.

This book has a long history of more than 20 years. The first attempt to write a monograph on information-theoretic approach to thermodynamics was done by one of the authors (RSI) in 1974 when he published, in the preprint form, two volumes of the book "Information Theory and Thermodynamics" concerning classical and quantum information theory, [153] (220 pp.), [154] (185 pp.). In spite of the encouraging remarks by some of the readers, the physical part of this book was never written except for the first chapter. Now this material is written completely anew and in much greater extent. A few years earlier, in 1970, second author of the present book, (AK), a doctoral student and collaborator of RSI in Toruli, published in Polish, also as a preprint, his habilitation dissertation "Information-theoretical decision scheme in quantum statistical mechanics" [196] (96 pp.). This small monograph presented his original results in the physical part of the theory developed in the Torun school. Unfortunately, this preprint was never published in English. The present book contains all these results in a much more modern and developed form.

This book develops a view of logic as a theory of information-driven agency and intelligent interaction between many agents - with conversation, argumentation and games as guiding examples. It provides one uniform account of dynamic logics for acts of inference, observation, questions and communication, that can handle both update of knowledge and revision of beliefs. It then extends the dynamic style of analysis to include changing preferences and goals, temporal processes, group action and strategic interaction in games. Throughout, the book develops a mathematical theory unifying all these systems, and positioning them at the interface of logic, philosophy, computer science and game theory. A series of further chapters explores repercussions of the 'dynamic stance' for these areas, as well as cognitive science.

The nature of distributed computation in complex systems has often been described in terms of memory, communication and processing. This thesis presents a complete information-theoretic framework to quantify these operations on information (i.e. information storage, transfer and modification), and in particular their dynamics in space and time. The framework is applied to cellular automata, and delivers important insights into the fundamental nature of distributed computation and the dynamics of complex systems (e.g. that gliders are dominant information transfer agents). Applications to several important network models, including random Boolean networks, suggest that the capability for information storage and coherent transfer are maximised near the critical regime in certain order-chaos phase transitions. Further applications to study and design information structure in the contexts of computational neuroscience and guided self-organisation underline the practical utility of the techniques presented here.

This book offers a new, theoretical approach to information dynamics, i.e., information processing in complex dynamical systems. The presentation establishes a consistent theoretical framework for the problem of discovering knowledge behind empirical, dynamical data and addresses applications in information processing and coding in dynamical systems. This will be an essential reference for those in neural computing, information theory, nonlinear dynamics and complex systems modeling.