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
Starting high school in 2016
My oldest boy started high school this year. He goes to an accessible private school nearby. We went to a parent’s meeting last night. Personal electronics is banned...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Function signature: how do you order parameters?
Most programming languages force you to order your function parameters. Getting them wrong might break your code. What is the most natural way to order the parameters...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Are there too many people?
Without immigration, most developed countries would face massive depopulation. In fact, half the population of the Earth lives in countries with sub-replacement...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The rate-of-living theory is wrong
The rate-of-living theory is popular on the Internet. The intuition is that all animals are born with some “budget” that they burn out over time according to their...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Innovation as a Fringe Activity
What do these people have in common: Marconi, Alexander Graham Bell, and the Steves Wozniak and Jobs? At least one commonality is that approximately nobody listened...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Faster dictionary decoding with SIMD instructions
A particularly fast and effective compression technique is dictionary coding. Intuitively, it works as follow. Suppose you are given a long document made of millions...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
How many reversible integer operations do you know?
Most operations on a computer are not reversible… meaning that once done, you can never go back. For example, if you divide integers by 2 to get a new integer,Continue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Let us talk about the Luddite problem…
This morning I woke up to an interview on the radio (yes, I still have a radio somehow) with pharmacists who decided (gulp!) to try to fulfill prescriptions byContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Combine smart people with crazily hard projects
Back in college, professors assigned crazily hard problems… and I was forced to talk with my peers to figure out how they fared… and eventually teaming up withContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Common sense in artificial intelligence… by 2026?
Lots of people want to judge machine intelligence based on human intelligence. It dates back to Turing who proposed his eponymous Turing test: can machines “pass”...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Accelerating PHP hashing by “unoptimizing” it
Hashing is a software trick that can map strings to fixed-length integers, such as 32-bit integers. It is ubiquitous in modern software. Languages like Java and...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Augmented reality becomes mainstream
My go-to reference lately about the near future has been the 2006 novel Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge. The novel is set in 2025 and the author depicts a world where...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Virtual Reality: First impressions with the HTC Vive
I just got my hands on some virtual-reality (VR) goggles. Specifically, we have an “HTC Vive“. We are still in the early days of VR and given that these goggles...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Fast random shuffling
In a random shuffle, you want to take the elements of a list and reorder them randomly. In a “fair” random shuffle, all possible permutations must be equally likely...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
A fast alternative to the modulo reduction
Suppose you want to pick an integer at random in a set of N elements. Your computer has functions to generate random 32-bit integers, how do you transform suchContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
I do not use a debugger
I learned to program with BASIC back when I was twelve. I would write elaborate programs and run them. Invariably, they would surprise me by failing to do whatContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
How fast is tabulation-based hashing? The downsides of Zobrist…
In practice, hashing is the process of taking an input, such as a string, and turning it into an integer value. It is a fundamental tool in programming, as most...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The strange case of the copyright of open-source software
Economists make a grave mistake when they fail to mention open-source software as one of the critical innovation of our era. Open-source software offers a great...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
To be smart, work on problems you care about
Never do anything that bores you. My experience in science is that someone is always telling to do something that leaves you flat. Bad idea. I’m not good enough...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog