Communications of the ACM
Research Archive
The Research archive provides access to all Research articles published in past issues of Communications of the ACM.
July 2012
From Communications of the ACM
Looking Back and Looking Forward: Power, Performance, and Upheaval
The past 10 years have delivered two significant revolutions. Microprocessor design has been transformed — leading to multicore processors. And an entirely new software landscape has emerged — revolutionizing how software is …
From Communications of the ACM
Intrinsic Robustness of the Price of Anarchy
The price of anarchy, defined as the ratio of the worst-case objective function value of a Nash equilibrium of a game and that of an optimal outcome, quantifies the inefficiency of selfish behavior.
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: For Better or Worse, Benchmarks Shape a Field
Like other IT fields, computer architects initially reported incomparable results. We quickly saw the folly of this approach. We then went through a sequence of performance metrics. When a field has good benchmarks, we settle…
From Communications of the ACM
Technical Perspective: Why Study the Price of Anarchy?
In 1999, Elias Koutsoupias and Christos Papadimitriou initiated the study of "How much worse off are we due to selfishness?" They compared the worst case pure Nash equilibria to the optimal solution. This ratio was later called…