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
Category: Uncategorized
Blockstack: a global naming and storage system secured by blockchain
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 algorithms: an overview
Quantum algorithms: an overview Montanaro, npj Quantum Information 2016 This is a paper that Preskill cited in his keynote address (see yesterday’s post). It covers some of the same ground that we looked at yesterday, but also has some additional material and perspective of interest — and I’ll focus on those parts today. We’ll touch … Continue reading Quantum algorithms: an overview
Quantum computing in the NISQ era and beyond
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
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
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
A theory of the learnable
A theory of the learnable Valiant, CACM 1984 (Also available in ) Today’s paper choice comes from the recommend study list of Prof. Margaret Martonosi’s 2015 Princeton course on “Great moments in computing.” A list I’m sure we’ll be dipping into again! There is a rich theory of computation when it comes to what we … Continue reading A theory of the learnable
A sample of brilliance
A sample of brilliance Jon Bentley et al., CACM 1987 (Also available in ) Jon Bentley’s “Programming Pearls” was a well-loved column in CACM (and also available in book form). Today we’re taking at look at his “Sample of Brilliance” column from 1987, featuring guest contributions from none other then Bob Floyd (whose Turing Award … Continue reading A sample of brilliance
The paradigms of programming
The paradigms of programming Floyd, CACM 1979 (Also available in ) A couple of weeks ago we looked at Dan Bernstein’s very topical “thoughts on security after ten years of qmail 1.0.” From the general reaction I can tell that lots of you enjoyed reading that paper, but in the discussions that I saw, no-one … Continue reading The paradigms of programming
A practitioner’s guide to reading programming languages papers
Last week I jokingly said that POPL papers must pass an ‘intellectual intimidation’ threshold in order to be accepted. That’s not true of course, but it is the case that programming languages papers can look especially intimidating to the practitioner (or indeed, the academic working in a different sub-discipline of computer science!). They are full … Continue reading A practitioner’s guide to reading programming languages papers
the morning paper 