Emergent complexity via multi-agent competition

January 11, 2018 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ Leave a comment

Emergent complexity via multi-agent competition Bansal et al., Open AI TR, 2017 (See also this Open AI blog post on ‘Competitive self-play’). Today’s action takes place in 3D worlds with simulated physics (using the MuJoCo framework). There are two types of agents, ants: And humanoids: These learn to play against each other (ant vs ant, ... Continue Reading

Mastering chess and shogi by self-play with a general reinforcement learning algorithm

January 10, 2018 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 3 Comments

Mastering chess and shogi by self-play with a general reinforcement learning algorithm Silver et al., arXiv 2017 We looked at AlphaGo Zero last year (and the first generation of AlphaGo before that), but this December 2017 update is still fascinating in its own right. Recall that AlphaGo Zero learned to play Go with only knowledge ... Continue Reading

The case for learned index structures – Part II

January 9, 2018 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 9 Comments

The case for learned index structures Kraska et al., arXiv Dec. 2017 Yesterday we looked at the big idea of using learned models in place of hand-coded algorithms for select components of systems software, focusing on indexing within analytical databases. Today we’ll be taking a closer look at range, point, and existence indexes built using ... Continue Reading

The case for learned index structures – part I

January 8, 2018 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 7 Comments

The case for learned index structures Kraska et al., arXiv Dec. 2017 Welcome to another year of papers on The Morning Paper. With the rate of progress in our field at the moment, I can’t wait to see what 2018 has in store for us! Two years ago, I started 2016 with a series of ... Continue Reading

End of term

December 15, 2017 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 15 Comments

We’ve reached the end of term again and it’s time for me to take a few weeks off to recharge my brain, reorganise & refill my paper backlog, and get ready for 2018! I’ve been reading and summarising a computer science research paper every weekday for over three years now. The knowledge I’ve gained has ... Continue Reading

Bolt: anonymous payment channels for decentralized currencies – Part II

December 14, 2017 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 3 Comments

Bolt: anonymous payment channels for decentralized currencies Green and Miers et al., CCS’17 Yesterday we spent some time looking at what payment channels are, their role in helping Bitcoin to scale by taking some of the load off of the chain, and some payment channels constructions such as direct channels, indirect channels via an intermediary, ... Continue Reading

Bolt: anonymous payment channels for decentralized currencies – part I

December 13, 2017 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 10 Comments

Bolt: anonymous payment channels for decentralized currencies Green and Miers et al., CCS’17 In which I tried not to rant. But did end up ranting just a little bit... The world of blockchains and cryptocurrencies seems to be growing at quite a pace. Yesterday we looked at Solidus, which provides confidentiality for transactions taking place ... Continue Reading

Solidus: confidential distributed ledger transactions using PVORM

December 12, 2017 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 2 Comments

Solidus: confidential distributed ledger transactions via PVORM Cecchetti et al., CCS’17 Tokens on blockchains can be used to represent assets, and the ledger provides trade settlement on-chain. In a straightforward public blockchain, pseudonyms and transaction values are all publicly visible. Uncovering the true identities behind the pseudonyms becomes a real possibility (‘A fistful of Bitcoins’). ... Continue Reading

Tail attacks on web applications

December 11, 2017 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 2 Comments

Tail attacks on web applications Shan et al., CCS’17 This paper introduces a stealthy DDoS attack on classic n-tier web applications. It is designed to push the tail latency high while simultaneously being very hard to detect using traditional monitoring tools. The attack exploits ‘millibottlenecks’ — caused by buffers in the system that fill up ... Continue Reading

Economic factors of vulnerability trade and exploitation

December 8, 2017 ~ Adrian Colyer ~ 1 Comment

Economic factors of vulnerability trade and exploitation Allodi, CCS’17 Today we’re going on a tour inside a prominent Russian cybercrime market, identified in the paper as ‘RuMarket’ (not its real name). The author infiltrated the market using a fake identity, and was subsequently able to collect data on market activities from 2010 to 2017. RuMarket ... Continue Reading

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