A place to store papers I've written.
Abstract:
The concept of alternative currencies is starting to grow in the global market and can prove to have lasting implications for the future of money and trade. Currencies are a means of communicating information about the value of goods and resources that when they fail to do so, cause market failures and inefficiencies. Alternative currencies provide an opportunity to correct the information problem presented by traditional currencies and could have a lasting effect on humanitys attempts at a smooth transition to a more sustainable and efficient future. Bitcoin, a cryptology based currency, is one such alternative that is currently taking hold in the global market. This paper will examine exactly how Bitcoins work, why the technology is so effective, look at Bitcoins history, provide insight into the future of transactions on a global scale, and ultimately answer the question “What gives money its value?”
Abstract:
The Grid-Based Path-Planning Competition is an effort to facilitate comparison between existing approaches to pathplanning through the use of widely available benchmark problems. Speedy and Weighted A* are two algorithms that perform suboptimal search and result in faster computation time in exchange for less than optimal final path costs. This paper will discuss the implementation of these algorithms and analyze the trade-off between optimal final path costs and computation time. The results of these algorithms will also be compared against existing approaches made available by the Grid-Based Path-Planning Competition. This paper also exists to fulfill a final project requirement for the University of New Hampshire Computer Science Department course CS830 Introduction to Artificial Intelligence.