Stuff I'm reading on a May afternoon

Looking forward to that long weekend? Wishing you had something to read? Try some of these...

• What the State Birds Should Be

  Everyone knows that state birds are a big joke. There are a million cardinals, a scattering of robins, and just a general lack of thought put into the whole thing.

  States should have to put more thought into their state bird than I put into picking my socks in the morning.

• Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning About a Highly Connected World

  Networks, Crowds, and Markets combines different scientific perspectives in its approach to understanding networks and behavior. Drawing on ideas from economics, sociology, computing and information science, and applied mathematics, it describes the emerging field of study that is growing at the interface of all these areas, addressing fundamental questions about how the social, economic, and technological worlds are connected.

  The book is based on an inter-disciplinary course entitled Networks that we teach at Cornell.

• Bayesian Programming and Learning for Multi-Player Video Games: Application to RTS AI

  we review the current solutions to problems raised by multi-player game AI, by outlining the types of computational and cognitive complexities in the main gameplay types. From here, we sum up the transversal categories of problems, introducing how Bayesian modeling can deal with all of them. We then explain how to build a Bayesian program from domain knowledge and observations through a toy role-playing game example. In the second part of the thesis, we detail our application of this approach to RTS AI, and the models that we built up. For reactive behavior (micro-management), we present a real-time multi-agent decentralized controller inspired from sensory motor fusion. We then show how to perform strategic and tactical adaptation to a dynamic opponent through opponent modeling and machine learning (both supervised and unsupervised) from highly skilled players’ traces.

• Where in the World is Satoshi Nakamoto?

  Then, in April 2011, Satoshi said he had "moved on to other things." Satoshi has not been heard from since then. But the quest to find Satoshi continues. This is that story.

• When We Held Kings: The oral history of the 2003 World Series of Poker

  Poker went from a game understood by few and played in smoky backrooms to a television staple. In this 10th-anniversary oral history, more than 30 people who were part of the event explain what happened and what it meant for the poker business.

• A Virtual Weimar: Hyperinflation in a Video Game World

  A culmination of a series of unanticipated circumstances — and, finally, a most unfortunate programming bug — has over the last few weeks produced a new and unforeseen dimension of hellishness within Diablo 3: hyperinflation.

• Distributed Systems Reading Group reading list

  (note: we probably won’t read anything already covered here: http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.824/schedule.html)

• 6.824: Distributed Systems: Spring 2013

  It will present abstractions and implementation techniques for engineering distributed systems. Major topics include fault tolerance, replication, and consistency. Much of the class consists of studying and discussing case studies of distributed systems.

• 6.828: Operating System Engineering

  You will study, in detail, virtual memory, kernel and user mode, system calls, threads, context switches, interrupts, interprocess communication, coordination of concurrent activities, and the interface between software and hardware. Most importantly, you will study the interactions between these concepts, and how to manage the complexity introduced by the interactions.

• Learning NVP, Part 1: High-Level Architecture

  This blog post kicks off a new series of posts describing my journey to become more knowledgeable about the Nicira Network Virtualization Platform (NVP). NVP is, in my opinion, an awesome platform, but there hasn’t been a great deal of information shared about the product, how it works, how you configure it, etc.

• The Oldest Algorithmic Patent?

  While doing some research on cryptographic history, I stumbled on what may be one of the oldest algorithmic patents. That is, what is patented is an algorithm, rather than a physical, biological, or electronic device. It's US patent 1,356,546, filed on December 4, 1918, and issued on October 26, 1920.

Enjoy your Memorial Day weekend.