Procedural generation is the idea of using simple rules to generate more complicated items - used in games such as Minecraft and Elite, Zac Garby of the University of Nottingham explains with the use of the game Carcassonne.

Features an implementation of wave function collapse.

Can’t fully understand because there are no words, but the author looks to be making a very neat connection between coalgebras and the executions (here “traces”) of transition systems. Became aware of her work through Adjoint School 2026.

via: https://www.cs.uni-salzburg.at/~anas/talks.html

We further develop the group-theoretic approach to fast matrix multiplication introduced by Cohn and Umans, and for the first time use it to derive algorithms asymptotically faster than the standard algorithm. We describe several families of wreath product groups that achieve matrix multiplication exponent less than 3, the asymptotically fastest of which achieves exponent 2.41. We present two conjectures regarding specific improvements, one combinatorial and the other algebraic. Either one would imply that the exponent of matrix multiplication is 2.

Part of Prof. Cohn’s larger matmul program. Don’t completely have the chops for it yet, but definitely something to hold onto.

This talk is an extension of my earlier Data Replication Design Spectrum blog post. The blog post was the analysis of the various replication algorithms, which concludes with showing that Raft has no particular advantage along any easy analyze/theoretical dimension. This builds on that argument to try and persuade you out of using Raft and to supply suggestions on how to work around the downsides of quorum-based or reconfiguration-based replication which makes people shy away from them.

Radix sort is older than the computer yet quicker than quick sort. Why aren’t we all using it?

Whether your app is local-first or more traditional, collaborative text editing is a tricky problem that requires advanced algorithms. Or does it? In this talk, I will describe a simple approach to collaborative text editing based on intuitive “insert after” operations. By using these operations in a general-purpose collaborative architecture (server reconciliation), you can implement text editing without CRDTs or OT. I will also discuss nuanced conflict resolution and decentralized variants.

Text version: https://mattweidner.com/2025/05/21/text-without-crdts.html