[cwn] Attn: Development Editor, Latest Caml Weekly News

[Alan Schmitt]

Hello,

Here is the latest Caml Weekly News, for the week of November 22 to 29, 2011.

1) Game Theory Library
2) New GADT iteration
3) PlasmaFS, PlasmaKV, and MapReduce, version 0.5.1
4) Other Caml News

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1) Game Theory Library
Archive: <https://sympa-roc.inria.fr/wws/arc/caml-list/2011-11/msg00122.html>
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** Abdallah Saffidine asked and Ashish Agarwal replied:

> I am looking for a library implementing Game Theory algorithms. I am
> specifically interested in solving zero-sum twpo-player normal form
> games (that is, finding the value of Nash equilibria in matrix
> games). In this setting, we can use linear programming to find the
> strategies in time polynomial in the size of the matrix.
> 
> Have you seeing any ocaml library for game theory? or if I need to
> implement it myself, which linear programming library would you
> recommend? (If there is any other than ocaml-gplk which comes first in
> google, that is)

We did not write any bindings directly to linear programming
libraries, but do have an AST and an embedded DSL for writing LPs in
OCaml along with some code generation to output in AMPL format. Paper
and code are available here:
<http://ashishagarwal.org/2010/01/18/automating-mp-transformations/>
      
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2) New GADT iteration
Archive: <https://sympa-roc.inria.fr/wws/arc/caml-list/2011-11/msg00129.html>
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** Continuing this old thread, Jacques Garrigue announced:

The new branch has now been merged in trunk, all ready for the next version 
of OCaml.

        <http://caml.inria.fr/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/ocaml/trunk>

Big thanks to Jeremy Yallop for finding many bugs.
But you still have your chance to find more :-)
      
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3) PlasmaFS, PlasmaKV, and MapReduce, version 0.5.1
Archive: <https://sympa-roc.inria.fr/wws/arc/caml-list/2011-11/msg00142.html>
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** Gerd Stolpmann announced:

I've just released Plasma-0.5.1, fixing a possible lock-up.

General information about Plasma:

Plasma consists now of three parts, namely PlasmaFS, PlasmaKV, and Plasma
Map/Reduce:

      * PlasmaFS is a distributed replicating filesystem. Unlike other
        such filesystems, it is transactional and exhibits transactions
        to the user. Also, it implements almost all of what is known as
        POSIX semantics, and it is mountable.
      * PlasmaKV is a key/value database on top of PlasmaFS. It is
        designed for ultra-high read workloads, and offers interesting
        properties borrowed from PlasmaFS (e.g. replication and ACID
        transactions).
      * Plasma Map/reduce implements a variant of the popular
        data processing scheme.

All pieces of software are bundled together in one download. The
project page with further links is

<http://projects.camlcity.org/projects/plasma.html>

There is now also a homepage at

<http://plasma.camlcity.org>

THIS IS NOW A BETA RELEASE! I'm searching for testers. Whoever has
access to a cluster please check Plasma out!

Plasma is installable via GODI for Ocaml 3.12.

For discussions on specifics of Plasma there is a separate mailing list:

<https://godirepo.camlcity.org/mailman/listinfo/plasma-list>
      
** Goswin von Brederlow asked and Gerd Stolpmann replied:

> Any plans to support fuse so the filesystem can be mounted locally?

You can already do this via NFS (V3). This is only a mild additional
overhead, and the Linux NFS client supports bigger blocksizes than fuse
(1M vs. 128K).

Fuse is on my list but low priority for now.
      
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4) Other Caml News
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** From the ocamlcore planet blog:

Thanks to Alp Mestan, we now include in the Caml Weekly News the links to the
recent posts from the ocamlcore planet blog at <http://planet.ocamlcore.org/>.

ocamlbuild stubs and dynamic libraries:
  <https://mancoosi.org/~abate/ocamlbuild-stubs-and-dynamic-libraries>

CamlDBM: binding to NDBM/GDBM databases:
  <https://forge.ocamlcore.org/projects/camldbm/>

OCamlnat 0.1.0:
  <http://caml.inria.fr/cgi-bin/hump.cgi?contrib=793>
      
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