Beckett’s Optimistic Heroine

Distributed Optimistic Concurrency Considered Optimistic

Optimistic concurrency relies on speculative execution, read-write conflict detection, and checkpointrollback techniques to provide a programming model that replaces locks with the abstraction of atomic, isolated execution of critical sections. Previous research has shown that on chip multi-processors, a class of workloads featuring irregular parallelism and rare read-write conflicts can reap s...

Optimistic AIXI

We consider extending the AIXI agent by using multiple (or even a compact class of) priors. This has the benefit of weakening the conditions on the true environment that we need to prove asymptotic optimality. Furthermore, it decreases the arbitrariness of picking the prior or reference machine. We connect this to removing symmetry between accepting and rejecting bets in the rationality axiomat...

Mary Edwards Walker (1832-1919): surgeon, feminist and war heroine.

In the Steps of Jael and Deborah: Judith as Heroine

Optimistic Programming in PVM

Optimism is a powerful technique for increasing concurrency. A program can gain concurrency by making an optimistic assumption about its future state, and verifying the assumption in parallel with computations based on the optimistic assumption. To date, use of optimism has been restricted to specialized systems due to the diiculty of writing optimistic programs. In this paper, we deene and jus...