Forró

Forró (Portuguese pronunciation: [fɔˈhɔ]^*) is a genre of Brazilian music that originated in Northeastern Brazil. It encompasses various dance styles as well as a number of different musical beats. This music genre has gained widespread popularity in all regions of Brazil. Forró is closely associated with Brazilian June Festivals, which celebrate a number of Christian saints. The most celebrated is Saint John's day.

Origin of the term

There are several theories on the origin of the name.

The main theory is that forró as a derivative of forrobodó, meaning "great party" or "commotion". This is the view held by Brazilian folklorist Luís da Câmara Cascudo, who studied the Brazilian Northeast through most of his life. Forrobodó is believed to come from the word forbodó (itself a corruption of fauxbourdon), which was used in the Portuguese court to define a dull party. The word forrobodó is itself very common in Portuguese popular conversation to describe a fun, but almost depraved and limitless party. This word was carried by Portuguese migration waves to Brazil, and lost the light negative meaning and was slowly simplified by their children.

FORR

FORR (FOr the Right Reasons) is a cognitive architecture for learning and problem solving inspired by Herbert A. Simon's ideas of bounded rationality and satisficing. It was first developed in the early 1990s at the City University of New York. It has been used in game playing, robot pathfinding, recreational park design, spoken dialog systems, and solving NP-hard constraint satisfaction problems, and is general enough for many problem solving applications.

Background

Bounded rationality

FORR does not have perfect knowledge of how to solve a problem, but instead learns from experience. Intelligent agents are not optimal, but make decisions based on only a subset of all possible good reasons and informative data. These agents can still be considered rational. This idea of bounded rationality was introduced by Herbert A. Simon, who along with Allen Newell developed the early foundations of the study of cognitive architectures and also inspired early architectures such as Soar and ACT-R.