Communications of the ACM
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How the “Frontier” Became the Slogan of Uncontrolled AI
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been billed as the next frontier of humanity: the newly available expanse whose exploration …
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
How fast can you bit-interleave 32-bit integers?
A practical trick in software is to “bit-interleave” your data. Suppose that I have two 4-bit integers like 0b1011 (11 in decimal) and 0b1100 (12 in decimal). I...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (January 5th, 2018)
You still have to burn more energy creating solar panels than solar panels can give back in a useful lifetime. Tyler Cowen writes: There is now a doctrine of what...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Can 32-byte alignment alleviate 4K aliasing?
In my previous post, I considered some performance problems that can plague simple loops that read and write data… for (int i = 0; i < a.length; ++i) { a[i] +=Continue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Don’t make it appear like you are reading your own recent writes
Richard Statin recently published a Java benchmark where the performance of a loop varies drastically depending on the size of the arrays involved. The loop isContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Year 2017: technological highlights
DeepStack and Libratus become the first computer programs to beat professinal poker players. We are using synthetic cartilage to help people with arthritis. Stem...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Multicore versus SIMD instructions: the “fasta” case study
Setting aside graphics processors, most commodity processors support at least two distinct parallel execution models. Most programmers are familiar with the multicore...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (December 29th, 2017)
It is often believed that, in the developed world, more land is used for human beings (cities, agriculture) as time goes by. That is not true: Forests are spreading...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Personal reflections on 2017
Year 2017 is coming to an end. As a kid, I would have surely imagined that by 2017, I would be living in space. But then I can chat with Amazon’s servers through...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (December 22nd, 2017)
Bitcoins are electronic records that are meant to be used as currency. They have become increasingly popular and expensive. Reportedly, the famous investment bank...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (December 15th, 2017)
Scientists found a human gene which, when inserted into mice, makes their brain grow larger. David Brin has a series of classical sci-fi books where we “uplift”...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
If all your attributes are independent two-by-two… are all your attributes independent?
Suppose that you are working on a business problem where you have multiple attributes… maybe you have a table with multiple columns such as “age, gender, income...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
No, a supercomputer won’t make your code run faster
I sometimes consult with bright colleagues from other departments who do advanced statistical models or simulations. They are from economics, psychology, and so...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (December 8th, 2017)
Facebook’s leading artificial-intelligence researcher Yan Lecun wrote: In the history of science and technology, the engineering artifacts have almost always preceded...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Simplistic programming is underrated
I was a nerdy kid who liked to spend a lot of time reading. Back then, we did not have the Internet, we could not even imagine it… so I ended up reading the dictionary...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (December 1st, 2017)
Chollet has a piece on the impossibility of intelligence explosion. He is responding to the theory that smart machines will build even smarter machines, and that...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Bit hacking versus memoization: a Stream VByte example
In compression techniques like Stream VByte or Google’s varint-GB, we use control bytes to indicate how blocks of data are compressed. Without getting into theContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (November 24th, 2017)
Women earned majority of doctoral degrees in 2016 for 8th straight year and outnumber men in grad school 135 to 100. Materialists use Facebook more frequently,Continue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
How often do superior alternatives fail to catch on?
Many of us rely on a Qwerty keyboard, at least when we are typing at a laptop. It is often said that the Qwerty keyboard is inferior to clearly better alternatives...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
You are your tools
I believe that there are no miracle people. When others get the same work done as you do, only much faster, they are almost surely using better tools. Tools are...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog