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
Science and Technology links (July 6th, 2019)
Jim Keller, the vice president of silicon engineering at Intel, is optimistic regarding the continued exponential progress in computing: “It’s going to keep going...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
A fast 16-bit random number generator?
In software, we often need to generate random numbers. Commonly, we use pseudo-random number generators. A simple generator is wyhash. It is a multiplication followed...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (June 29th 2019)
Consuming pornography has no effect on sexual desire for one’s partner. Exercise may increase the likelihood that a woman will become pregnant. Consuming more protein...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Bounding the cost of the intersection between a small array and a large array
Consider the scenario where you are given a small sorted array of integers (e.g., [1,10,100]) and a large sorted array ([1,2,13,51,…]). You want to compute theContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (June 22nd 2019)
An implemented chip can improve long-term memory. It is currently impractical, but a start-up company will try to bring this technology to market. Never beforeContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
How fast is getline in C++?
A standard way to read a text file in C++ is to call the getline function. To iterate over all lines in file and sum up their length, you might do as follows: while...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
What should we do with “legacy” Java 8 applications?
Java is a mature programming language. It was improved over many successive versions. Mostly, new Java versions did not break your code. Thus Java was a great,Continue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (June 15th 2019)
We know that naked mole rats are ageless mammals, in the sense that their mortality rate appear constant (not increasing with age). We believe that many sea creatures...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (June 7th 2019)
There is a new drug reaching phase-3 clinical trials (the last phase) for knee osteoarthritis. It seems to be able to regrow cartilage. Bank of America analysts...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Nearly Divisionless Random Integer Generation On Various Systems
It is common in software to need random integers within a range of values. For example, you may need to pick an object at random in an array. Random shuffling algorithms...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (June 1st 2019)
The DeepMind engineers built an artificial intelligence (a software program) that can learn to play 3D shooter games at super-human levels. Researchers have found...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (May 25th 2019)
Oculus released the Quest, its latest VR goggles. It requires no wiring, no PC. It supports six degrees of freedom, so it is “true VR”. They cost less than $600...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Measuring the system clock frequency using loops (Intel and ARM)
In my previous post, Bitset decoding on Apple’s A12, I showed that Apple’s latest ARM-based processor can decode set bits out of a stream of words using 3 cycles...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (May 18th 2019)
Though depression has genetic components, the previous studies that identified “depression genes” are probably all bogus. They are the results of poorly conducted...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Building better software with better tools: sanitizers versus valgrind
We often have to write code using permissive programming languages like C and C++. They tend to generate hard-to-debug problems that can crash your applications...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Bitset decoding on Apple’s A12
In my post Really fast bitset decoding for “average” densities, I reported on our work accelerating the decoding of bitsets. E.g., given a 64-bit register, youContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Setting up a ROCKPro64 (powerful single-card computer)
A few months ago, I ordered ROCKPro64. If you are familiar with the Raspberry Pi, then it is a bit of the same… an inexpensive computer that comes in the form of...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (May 11th 2019)
Bone marrow transplanted from young mice to very old (almost dying) mice extended the life of the old mice by 30%. The authors conclude that bone-marrow transplantation...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Almost picking N distinct numbers at random
In Picking N distinct numbers at random: how to do it fast?, I describe how to quickly pick N distinct values are random from a range of values. It comes down to...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog