As CPU cores become both faster and more numerous, the limiting factor for most programs is now, and will be for some time, memory access. Hardware designers have come up with ever more sophisticated memory handling and acceleration techniques–such as CPU caches–but these cannot work optimally without some help from the programmer. Unfortunately, neither the structure nor the cost of using the ...

In many applications, the content of a database changes over time. For example, new customer sequences are periodically added to a bookstore’s database as the store attracts new customers. Similarly, every visit to a Web site will add a new log to the site’s log database. There are also situations in which we have to delete sequences from the database. As an example, when mining current access ...

This is about the ninth edition of the Multi-Agent Programming Contest, an annual, community-serving competition that attracts groups from all over the world. Our contest enables head-to-head comparison of multi-agent systems and supports educational efforts in the design and implementation of such systems. This year we have generated a multitude of statistical data for each match and give a de...

We often need to estimate the size of wild populations to determine the appropriate management action, for example, to set a harvest quota. Monitoring is usually planned under the assumption that it must be carried out at fixed intervals in time, typically annually, before the harvest quota is set. However, monitoring can be very expensive, and we should weigh the cost of monitoring against the...