Abstract.A study on a 220-piece corpus (baroque, classical, romantic, 12-tone, jazz, rock, DNA strings, and random music) reveals that aesthetically pleasing music may be describable under the Zipf-Mandelbrot law. Various Zipf-based metrics have been developed and evaluated. Some focus on musictheoretic attributes such as pitch, pitch and duration, melodic intervals, and harmonic intervals. Others focus on higher-order attributes and fractal aspects of musical balance. Zipf distributions across certain dimensions appear to be a necessary, but not sufficient condition for pleasant music. Statistical analyses suggest that combinations of Zipf-based metrics might be used to identify genre and/or composer. This is supported by a preliminary experiment with a neural network classifier. We describe an evolutionary music framework under development, which utilizes Zipf-based metrics as fitness functions.
The last decade has sparked several valiant efforts in deductive verification of distributed agreement protocols such as consensus and leader election. Oddly, there have been far fewer verification efforts that go beyond the core protocols and target applications that are built on top of agreement protocols. This is unfortunate, as agreement-based distributed services such as data stores, locks, and ledgers are ubiquitous and potentially permit modular, scalable verification approaches that mimic their modular design. We address this need for verification of distributed agreement-based systems through our novel modeling and verification framework, QuickSilver, that is not only modular, but also fully automated. The key enabling feature of QuickSilver is our encoding of abstractions of verified agreement protocols that facilitates modular, decidable, and scalable automated verification. We demonstrate the potential of QuickSilver by modeling and efficiently verifying a series of tricky case studies, adapted from real-world applications, such as a data store, a lock service, a surveillance system, a pathfinding algorithm for mobile robots, and more.
Inspired by distributed applications that use consensus or other agreement protocols for global coordination, we define a new computational model for parameterized systems that is based on a general global synchronization primitive and allows for global transition guards. Our model generalizes many existing models in the literature, including broadcast protocols and guarded protocols. We show that reachability properties are decidable for systems without guards, and give sufficient conditions under which they remain decidable in the presence of guards. Furthermore, we investigate cutoffs for reachability properties and provide sufficient conditions for small cutoffs in a number of cases that are inspired by our target applications.
Cryptographic techniques have the potential to enable distrusting parties to collaborate in fundamentally new ways, but their practical implementation poses numerous challenges. An important class of such cryptographic techniques is known as secure multi-party computation (MPC). Deploying secure MPC protocols in realistic scenarios requires extensive knowledge spanning multiple areas of cryptography and systems even for seemingly simple applications. And while the steps to arrive at a solution for a particular application are pedestrian, it remains difficult to make the implementation efficient, and cumbersome to apply those same steps to a slightly different application from scratch. Hence, it is an important problem to design an ecosystem for building secure MPC applications with minimum effort and using techniques accessible to non-experts in cryptography.In an effort to provide such an ecosystem for building secure MPC applications using higher degrees of automation, we present the HACCLE (High Assurance Compositional Cryptography: Languages and Environments) toolchain. The HACCLE toolchain contains an embedded domain-specific language (Harpoon) for software developers without cryptographic expertise to write MPC-based programs. Harpoon programs are compiled into acyclic circuits represented in HACCLE's Intermediate Representation (HIR) that serves as an abstraction for implementing a computation using different cryptographic protocols such as secret sharing, homomorphic encryption, or garbled circuits. Implementations of different cryptographic protocols serve as different backends of our toolchain. The extensible design of HIR allows cryptographic experts to plug in new primitives and protocols to realize computations.We have implemented HACCLE, and used it to program interesting algorithms and applications (e.g., secure auction, matrix-vector multiplication, and merge sort). We show that the performance is improved by using our optimization strategies and heuristics.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.