This paper, answers a long-standing open problem in the programming languages community: is it possible to smear paint on the wall without creating valid Perl?
"Over the past couple of decades, the research literature has filled up with endless new nature-based metaphors for algorithms. You can find algorithms based on the behaviour of cuckoos, bees, bats, cats, wolves, galaxy formation and black holes. (...) All researchers have been doing is wasting time on developing new approaches that are probably little better than existing ones. And the language of each metaphor then invades the literature, distracting people from using the already sufficiently expressive terminology of mathematics and, above all, working together to find the best way forward."
The golden era of fireworks-like algorithm is about to end
Evolutionary Strategies are able to explore broader areas of the search space than reinforcement learning techniques. Thus, they are able to encounter strange bugs resulting in large rewards.
"A paper posted online in January takes theoretical computer scientists halfway toward proving one of the biggest conjectures in their field. The new study, when combined with three other recent papers, offers the first tangible progress toward proving the Unique Games Conjecture since it was proposed in 2002 by Subhash Khot, a computer scientist now at New York University.
Over the past decade and a half, the conjecture - which asks whether you can efficiently color networks in a certain way - has inspired discoveries in topics as diverse as the geometry of foams and the stability of election systems. And if the conjecture can be proved, its implications will reach far beyond network-coloring: It will establish what is the best algorithm for every problem in which you're trying to satisfy as many as possible of a set of constraints - the rules in a sudoku puzzle, or the seating preferences of a collection of wedding guests, for instance."
IBM for the first time ever is making quantum computing available to the public, providing access to a quantum processor via the cloud. Users can create algorithms and run experiments and get inspired by the possibilities of a quantum computer.
Mathias Troyer from ETH Zurtich gave a talk in Leiden where he showed what he wants to be the replacement to this IBM programming or the best ally of it - program quantum computers with, for instance, python code.
Nice developments coming from the quantum coding field, besides the fact we are ages away from a practical quantum computer.
The EFF communicate is actually quite inaccurate. This is disappointing from the EFF, though for some part, it is due to the communication from the researchers who "discovered" the attack.
PGP itself is not broken, but rather some implementations on some email clients (notably Enigmail, though it was patched several months ago). See https://protonmail.com/blog/pgp-vulnerability-efail/
On the other hand, if you are very keen on security, there is an XSS attack reported on Signal, so… https://thehackernews.com/2018/05/signal-messenger-code-injection.html
The *good* recommendation here is actually rather to keep your software stack up to date (surprising, no?) and keep encrypting your emails.
"...the European Commission announced in 2016 that it was investing one billion euros in a research effort known as the Quantum Technology Flagship. The goal for this project is to develop four technologies: quantum communication, quantum simulation, quantum computing, and quantum sensing. After almost two years, how is it going?"
arxiv link to the actual report: http://arxiv.org/abs/1712.03773