Hacker Combat: A Competitive Sport from Programmatic Dueling & Cyberwarfare

The history of humanhood has included competitive activities of many different forms. Sports have offered many benefits beyond that of entertainment. At the time of this article, there exists not a competitive ecosystem for cyber security beyond that of conventional capture the flag competitions, and the like. This paper introduces a competitive framework with a foundation on computer science, and hacking. This proposed competitive landscape encompasses the ideas underlying information security, software engineering, and cyber warfare. We also demonstrate the opportunity to rank, score, & categorize actionable skill levels into tiers of capability. Physiological metrics are analyzed from participants during gameplay. These analyses provide support regarding the intricacies required for competitive play, and analysis of play. We use these intricacies to build a case for an organized competitive ecosystem. Using previous player behavior from gameplay, we also demonstrate the generation of an artificial agent purposed with gameplay at a competitive level

Transparent multi-core speculative parallelization of DES models with event and cross-state dependencies

In this article we tackle transparent parallelization of Discrete Event Simulation (DES) models to be run on top of multi-core machines according to speculative schemes. The innovation in our proposal lies in that we consider a more general programming and execution model, compared to the one targeted by state of the art PDES platforms, where the boundaries of the state portion accessible while processing an event at a specific simulation object do not limit access to the actual object state, or to shared global variables. Rather, the simulation object is allowed to access (and alter) the state of any other object, thus causing what we term cross-state dependency. We note that this model exactly complies with typical (easy to manage) sequential-style DES programming, where a (dynamically-allocated) state portion of object A can be accessed by object B in either read or write mode (or both) by, e.g., passing a pointer to B as the payload of a scheduled simulation event. However, while read/write memory accesses performed in the sequential run are always guaranteed to observe (and to give rise to) a consistent snapshot of the state of the simulation model, consistency is not automatically guaranteed in case of parallelization and concurrent execution of simulation objects with cross-state dependencies. We cope with such a consistency issue, and its application-transparent support, in the context of parallel and optimistic executions. This is achieved by introducing an advanced memory management architecture, able to efficiently detect read/write accesses by concurrent objects to whichever object state in an application transparent manner, together with advanced synchronization mechanisms providing the advantage of exploiting parallelism in the underlying multi-core architecture while transparently handling both cross-state and traditional event-based dependencies. Our proposal targets Linux and has been integrated with the ROOT-Sim open source optimistic simulation platform, although its design principles, and most parts of the developed software, are of general relevance. Copyright 2014 ACM

Cooperating intelligent systems

Some of the issues connected to the development of a bureaucratic system are discussed. Emphasis is on a layer multiagent approach to distributed artificial intelligence (DAI). The division of labor in a bureaucracy is considered. The bureaucratic model seems to be a fertile model for further examination since it allows for the growth and change of system components and system protocols and rules. The first part of implementing the system would be the construction of a frame based reasoner and the appropriate B-agents and E-agents. The agents themselves should act as objects and the E-objects in particular should have the capability of taking on a different role. No effort was made to address the problems of automated failure recovery, problem decomposition, or implementation. Instead what has been achieved is a framework that can be developed in several distinct ways, and which provides a core set of metaphors and issues for further research

Checkout system tradeoff study

Selection considerations for prelaunch test equipment system for Apollo telescope moun

nanopub-java: A Java Library for Nanopublications

The concept of nanopublications was first proposed about six years ago, but it lacked openly available implementations. The library presented here is the first one that has become an official implementation of the nanopublication community. Its core features are stable, but it also contains unofficial and experimental extensions: for publishing to a decentralized server network, for defining sets of nanopublications with indexes, for informal assertions, and for digitally signing nanopublications. Most of the features of the library can also be accessed via an online validator interface.Comment: Proceedings of 5th Workshop on Linked Science 201

Learning to Infer Graphics Programs from Hand-Drawn Images

We introduce a model that learns to convert simple hand drawings into graphics programs written in a subset of \LaTeX. The model combines techniques from deep learning and program synthesis. We learn a convolutional neural network that proposes plausible drawing primitives that explain an image. These drawing primitives are like a trace of the set of primitive commands issued by a graphics program. We learn a model that uses program synthesis techniques to recover a graphics program from that trace. These programs have constructs like variable bindings, iterative loops, or simple kinds of conditionals. With a graphics program in hand, we can correct errors made by the deep network, measure similarity between drawings by use of similar high-level geometric structures, and extrapolate drawings. Taken together these results are a step towards agents that induce useful, human-readable programs from perceptual input

The ISCIP Analyst, Volume IV, Issue 2

This repository item contains a single issue of The ISCIP Analyst, an analytical review journal published from 1996 to 2010 by the Boston University Institute for the Study of Conflict, Ideology, and Policy