links for 2010-06-23

  • "In this paper, we briefly review the concept of memory circuit elements, namely memristors, memcapacitors and meminductors, and then discuss some applications by focusing mainly on the first class. We present several examples, their modeling and applications ranging from analog programming to biological systems. Since the phenomena associated with memory are ubiquitous at the nanoscale, we expect the interest in these circuit elements to increase in coming years."
  • "…The intrinsic underlying structure of the system is modeled by an epsilon-machine and its causal states. The decisional states are the emerging patterns corresponding to the utility function. In a complex systems perspective, these patterns thus form a partition of the lower-level system states that is defined according to the higher-level user's knowledge. The transitions between these decisional states correspond to events that lead to a change of decision. An algorithm is provided so as to estimate the states and their transitions from data. Application examples are given for hidden model reconstruction, cellular automata filtering, and edge detection in images."

links for 2010-06-20

  • "A key problem in multiobjective linear programming is to find the set of all efficient extreme points in objective space. In this paper we introduce oriented projective geometry as an efficient and effective framework for solving this problem. The key advantage of oriented projective geometry is that we can work with an "optimally simple" but unbounded efficiency-equivalent polyhedron, yet apply to it the familiar theory and algorithms that are traditionally restricted to bounded polytopes. We apply these techniques to Benson's outer approximation algorithm, using oriented projective geometry to remove an exponentially large complexity from the algorithm and thereby remove a significant burden from the running time."
  • "…The conclusion is that nondeterminism confers extra power to assemble a shape from a small tile system, but unless the polynomial hierarchy collapses, it is computationally more difficult to exploit this power by finding the size of the smallest tile system, compared to finding the size of the smallest deterministic tile system."
  • BLOCK POPUPS BEFORE VISITING

    "It was the final unanswered question about Windows 7. But now, thanks to numerous reader reports, my own hands-on experience, and a briefing with the team at Microsoft responsible for this technology, I think we have some answers. Sadly, Microsoft is still making it difficult to clean install Windows 7 with Upgrade media, as it did with Windows Vista. But fear not, there is some good news. While you can't simply use Upgrade media to do a clean install of Windows 7 on a new or previously formatted PC, the workarounds this time are easier than ever. And that's what this article is all about: Revealing the secrets to clean-installing Windows 7 with Upgrade media."

  • "The evolution and maintenance of cooperation fascinated researchers for several decades. Recently, theoretical models and experimental evidence show that costly punishment may facilitate cooperation in human societies, but may not be used by winners. The puzzle how the costly punishment behaviour evolves can be solved under voluntary participation. Could the punishers emerge if participation is compulsory? Is the punishment inevitably a selfish behaviour or an altruistic behaviour? The motivations behind punishment are still an enigma. …"

links for 2010-06-19

links for 2010-06-16

  • "Evolutionary adaptation is the process that increases the fit of a population to the fitness landscape it inhabits. As a consequence, evolutionary dynamics is shaped, constrained, and channeled, by that fitness landscape. Much work has been expended to understand the evolutionary dynamics of adapting populations, but much less is known about the structure of the landscapes. Here, we study the global and local structure of complex fitness landscapes of interacting loci that describe protein folds or sets of interacting genes forming pathways or modules. We find that in these landscapes, high peaks are more likely to be found near other high peaks, corroborating Kauffman's "Massif Central" hypothesis. We study the clusters of peaks as a function of the ruggedness of the landscape and find that this clustering allows peaks to form interconnected networks.…"
  • "The feed-forward relationship naturally observed in time-dependent processes and in a diverse number of real systems -such as some food-webs and electronic and neural wiring- can be described in terms of so-called directed acyclic graphs (DAGs). An important ingredient of the analysis of such networks is a proper comparison of their observed architecture against an ensemble of randomized graphs, thereby quantifying the {\em randomness} of the real systems with respect to suitable null models. This approximation is particularly relevant when the finite size and/or large connectivity of real systems make inadequate a comparison with the predictions obtained from the so-called {\em configuration model}. In this paper we analyze four methods of DAG randomization as defined by the desired combination of topological invariants (directed and undirected degree sequence and component distributions) aimed to be preserved.…"
  • "In this paper, we consider the problem of blocking malicious traffic on the Internet, via source-based filtering. In particular, we consider filtering via access control lists (ACLs): these are already available at the routers today but are a scarce resource because they are stored in the expensive ternary content addressable memory (TCAM). Aggregation (by filtering source prefixes instead of individual IP addresses) helps reduce the number of filters, but comes also at the cost of blocking legitimate traffic originating from the filtered prefixes. We show how to optimally choose which source prefixes to filter, for a variety of realistic attack scenarios and operators' policies. In each scenario, we design optimal, yet computationally efficient, algorithms. Using logs from Dshield.org, we evaluate the algorithms and demonstrate that they bring significant benefit in practice."
  • "We give an algorithm that computes the final state of certain growth models without computing all intermediate states. Our technique is based on a "least action principle" which characterizes the odometer function of the growth process. Starting from an educated guess for the odometer, we successively correct under- and overestimates and provably arrive at the correct final state. The degree of speedup depends on the accuracy of the initial guess.
    Determining the size of the boundary fluctuations in internal diffusion-limited aggregation is a long-standing open problem in statistical physics. As an application of our method, we calculate the size of fluctuations over two orders of magnitude beyond previous simulations. Our data strongly support the conjecture that the fluctuations are logarithmic in the radius."

links for 2010-06-13

  • "A new algorithm for reconstructing a two dimensional object from a set of one dimensional projected views is presented that is both computationally exact and experimentally practical. The algorithm has a computational complexity of O(n log2 n) with n = N^2 for an NxN image, is robust in the presence of noise and produces no artefacts in the reconstruction process, as is the case with conventional tomographic methods. The reconstruction process is approximation free because the object is assumed to be discrete and utilizes fully discrete Radon transforms. Noise in the projection data can be suppressed further by introducing redundancy in the reconstruction. The number of projections required for exact reconstruction and the response to noise can be controlled without comprising the digital nature of the algorithm.…"
  • "This paper presents the design and analysis of parallel approximation algorithms for facility-location problems, including $\NC$ and $\RNC$ algorithms for (metric) facility location, $k$-center, $k$-median, and $k$-means. These problems have received considerable attention during the past decades from the approximation algorithms community, concentrating primarily on improving the approximation guarantees. In this paper, we ask, is it possible to parallelize some of the beautiful results from the sequential setting?"