It is the desperate moment when we discover that this empire which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless ruin, that corruption’s gangrene has spread too far to be healed by our scepter, that the triumph over enemy sovereigns has made us the heirs of their long undoing.

— Invisible Cities (Italo Calvino)

In the IR reading group this week I decided to read the Percolator paper from Google[1]. It caused quite a stir on several news-reading sites after a Google Research blog-post on the topic. Since I’ve never had the chance to read it, this is as good a time as any. This is not a comprehensive summary at all and lots of results here are hand-wavy. If you want to instruct yourself, please read the paper.