Author: adriancolyer

Venture Partner with Accel in London, author of 'The Morning Paper'

OmniLedger: a secure, scale-out decentralized ledger via sharding

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OmniLedger: A secure, scale-out, decentralized ledger via sharding Kokoris-Kogias et al., IEEE S&P 2018 OmniLedger makes a nice complement to Chainspace that we looked at yesterday. The two systems were developed independently at the same time. OmniLedger combines Visa levels of scalability (caution: the authors compare against the average Visa tps, the peak tps in … Continue reading OmniLedger: a secure, scale-out decentralized ledger via sharding

Chainspace: a sharded smart contracts platform

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Chainspace: a sharded smart contracts platform Al-Bassam et al., NDSS’18 Chainspace is a DApp (decentralised application) platform based on smart contracts, designed for higher scalability than is currently achievable with Bitcoin or Ethereum. Our modest testbed of 60 cores achieves 350 transactions per second, as compared with a peak rate of less than 7 transactions … Continue reading Chainspace: a sharded smart contracts platform

Blockstack: a global naming and storage system secured by blockchain

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Blockstack: a global naming and storage system secured by blockchains Ali et al., USENIX ATC’16 We’ll be back in the world of cryptocurrencies and blockchains for the rest of this week, kicking off with this 2016 paper on Blockstack. It’s interesting both for the lessons learned trying to build a system on top of the … Continue reading Blockstack: a global naming and storage system secured by blockchain

Quantum computing in the NISQ era and beyond

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Quantum computing in the NISQ era and beyond Preskill, Q2B 2017 Today’s paper is based on the keynote address given by John Preskill at the December 2017 ‘Quantum computing for business’ conference. It provides a great overview of the state of quantum computing today, and what we might reasonably expect to see over the coming … Continue reading Quantum computing in the NISQ era and beyond

Polynomial-time algorithms for prime factorization and discrete logarithms on a quantum computer

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Polynomial-time algorithms for prime factorization and discrete logarithms on a quantum computer Shor, 1996 We’re sticking with the “Great moments in computing” series again today, and it’s the turn of Shor’s algorithm, the breakthrough work that showed it was possible to efficiently factor primes on a quantum computer (with all of the consequences for cryptography … Continue reading Polynomial-time algorithms for prime factorization and discrete logarithms on a quantum computer

Learning representations by back-propagating errors

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Learning representations by back-propagating errors Rumelhart et al., Nature, 1986 It’s another selection from Martonosi’s 2015 Princeton course on “Great moments in computing” today: Rumelhart’s classic 1986 paper on back-propagation. (Geoff Hinton is also listed among the authors). You’ve almost certainly come across back-propagation before of course, but there’s still a lot of pleasure to … Continue reading Learning representations by back-propagating errors