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
Are we really testing an anti-aging pill? And what does it mean?
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved a clinical trial for “an anti-aging pill”. The pill is simply metformin. Metformin is a cheap drug that...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The mysterious aging of astronauts
When I took Physics courses in college, I learned about how astronauts should age a tiny bit slower than us. Of course, they would be exposed to a lot more radiation...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Being ever more productive… is a duty
As we work at something, we usually get better and better. Then you hit a plateau. For most of human history, people have been hitting this plateau, and they just...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Is peer review slowing down science and technology?
Ten years ago, a team lead by Irina Conboy at the University of California at Berkeley showed something remarkable in a Nature paper: if you take old cells andContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Identifying influential citations: it works live today!
Life has a way to give me what I want. Back in 2009, I wrote that instead of following conferences or journals, I would rather follow individual researchers. At...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Is artificial intelligence going to wipe us out in 30 years?
Many famous people have recently grown concerned that artificial intelligence is going to become a threat to humanity in the near future. The wealthy entrepreneur...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Crazily fast hashing with carry-less multiplications
We all know the regular multiplication that we learn in school. To multiply a number by 3, you can multiply a number by two and add it with itself. Programmers...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Faster hashing without effort
Modern software spends much time hashing objects. There are many fancy hash functions that are super fast. However, without getting fancy, we can easily doubleContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
On the memory usage of maps in Java
Though we have plenty of memory in our computers, there are still cases where you want to minimize memory usage if only to avoid expensive cache faults. To compare...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Where are all the search trees?
After arrays and linked lists, one of the first data structures computer-science students learn is the search tree. It usually starts with the binary search tree...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Secular stagnation: we are trimming down
Economists worry that we have entered in a secular stagnation called the Great Stagnation. To summarize: whereas industrial productivity grew steadily for mostContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Predicting the near future is a crazy, impossible game
Back in 1903, the Wright brothers flew for the first time, 20 feet above ground, for 12 seconds. Hardly anyone showed up. The event went vastly unnoticed. It was...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
JavaScript and fast data structures: some initial experiments
Two of my favorite data structures are the bitset and the heap. The latter is typically used to implement a priority queue. Both of these data structures come by...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Foolish enough to leave important tasks to a mere human brain?
To the ancient Greeks, the male reproductive organ was mysterious. They had this organ that can expand suddenly, then provide the seed of life itself. Today, much...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Could big data and wearables help the fight against diseases?
Biologists and medical researchers are used to drinking data with a straw. Doctors measure heart rate, weight and blood pressure, one at a time, at a high cost....
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The “consensus” is sometimes wrong
Anyone who has a critical mind and who attended college long enough, knows not to trust textbooks. They are full of mistakes. Because textbooks tend to copy each...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The hacker culture is winning
Driven by companies like Google, the hacker spirit is winning. Though we fail to see it, our culture is being hacked. One annoying element of this culture has become...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Hackers vs. Academics: who is responsible for progress?
Many years ago, I interviewed for a job at a nearby college. One of the professors started talking about how they were working to take the “hacker spirit” out of...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Revisiting Vernor Vinge’s “predictions” for 2025
Vernor Vinge is a retired mathematics professor who became famous through his science-fiction novels. He is also famous as being one of the first to contemplate...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog