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
Programming competition with $1000 in prizes: make my code readable!
Colm MacCárthaigh is organizing a programming competition with three 3 prizes: $500, $300, $200. The objective? Produce the most readable, easy to follow, and well...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Arbitrary byte-to-byte maps using ARM NEON?
Modern processors have fast instructions that can operate on wide registers (e.g., 128-bit). ARM processors, the kind of processors found in your phone, have such...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (July 20th 2019)
Researchers solve the Rubik’s cube puzzle using machine learning (deep learning). There has been a rise in the popularity of “deep learning” following some major...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (July 13th 2019)
Drinking juice increases your risk of having cancer. College completion rates are increasing and this may have to do with lower standards. Australia is going to...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Parsing JSON quickly on tiny chips (ARM Cortex-A72 edition)
I own an inexpensive card-size ROCKPro64 computer ($60). It has a ARM Cortex-A72 processors, the same processors you find in the recently released Raspberry PiContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Parsing JSON using SIMD instructions on the Apple A12 processor
Most modern processors have “SIMD instructions“. These instructions operate over wide registers, doing many operations at once. For example, you can easy subtract...
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