Four short links: 11 October 2018
Decentralized Applications, Global Startups, Better Shuffling, and Prolog Text
- Decentralized Applications (MIT) — interesting course to be taught by Robert T Morris. The goal of 6.S974 is to understand recent efforts in decentralized applications, to learn what the main design trade-offs are, and to identify areas for new research. My spidey-sense is tingling. This has all the hallmarks of one of those courses whose graduates build the next wave of companies and research areas.
- America Is Losing Its Startup Edge — ignore the use of percentages and Decline of Roman^W American Empire alarmism, it’s the rise of the rest of the world that’s fascinating here. While it is true that venture-capital investment in the U.S. continues to rise, having reached more than $90 billion in 2017, such investment is growing even faster in other parts of the world, expanding by nearly 375%—more than twice the 160% increase here. China saw the largest jump, its share expanding from 4% of global venture investment in 2005 to a nearly a quarter of it by 2017.
- Playlist Shuffle — This paper proposes a novel approach at shuffling a looping sequence that minimizes caveats of naive solutions, keeps computation low, and offers a high degree of variance. […] The problem is how to repeatedly shuffle a cyclic list and avoid too close and too far duplicates.
- Art of Prolog, 2E — this 1994 classic is now an open access title, free PDF download. Prolog is rational AI magic, while deep learning is intuitive AI magic.
