New Horizons

For our greatest delight (at least mine), Andrew Lipson is a crazy guy. He's building many funny things in Lego. Like topological surfaces, Klein bottle, from the in/out-side ! Escher pictures, waterfall Or scultpures, like Rodin's thinker However, lego construction may be a way to counter-act the financial crisis which has the inconvenient to cut funding in research laboratory. For instance, Daniel strange (I don't invent anything !) built and programmed a crane that moves in a set path, raising and lowering the sample between beakers containing solutions using a Lego Mindstorms NXT kit. Neat.

For more than a year or so, I am completely amazed to realize that what I would call the random approach , both in terms of computational algorithm and hardware design, has unexpected but very encouraging properties. Microprocessor come up with a many error-correcting processes, using a large amount of overall CPU resources (energy, wall-clock time, etc). By allowing the hardware to make a few mistakes, managed to be under some probability law, scientists of the Rice-NTU Institute for Sustainable and Applied Info dynamics (ISAID) lead by Krishna Palem, showed that significant gain could be possible, both in term of energy demand and performance. Also by trimming away ( pruning in the jargon) some rarely used portions of the chip and confining locally voltage requirements researchers  have been able to take advantage in energy requirements. “In the latest tests, we showed that pruning could cut energy demands 3.5 times with chips that deviated from the correct valu...

Each morning, as soon as I arrive in front of my computer, I generally spend a couple of minutes browsing articles of the day on arxiv.org , in particular in the "Numerical Analysis" section (and sometimes on Computational Physic, but that's when I'm in tramping mode). This systematically browsing might look a bit fastidious, but I like to have an large overview of the newest developpements. In that topic I came across an article named "General Complex Polynomial Root Solver and Its Further Optimization for Binary Microlenses" which has a very interesting appendix (B, page 20) about the utility of patenting algorithms, in particular the discussion stands on the classical book "Numerical Recipes". In fact the author happened to write this article because they needed a different method to compute roots of complex polynomials than the one proposed in the NR book, because of copyright violation. So in some sense, they argue that "copyri...