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 (March 24, 2017)
There are many claims that innovation is slowing down. In the XXth century, we went from horses to planes. What have we done lately? We have not cured cancer or...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Does software performance still matter?
This morning, a reader asked me about the real-world relevance of software performance: I’m quite interested in your work on improving algorithm performance using...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (March 17, 2017)
We live in a world where the most powerful companies in the world have super smart people working on trying to emulate human intelligence in machines. Yann LeCun...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Stable Priority Queues?
A priority queue is a data structure that holds a set of elements and can return quickly the smallest (or alternatively the largest) element. It is usually implemented...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (March 10, 2017)
In Mnemonic Training Reshapes Brain Networks to Support Superior Memory (published in Neuron, March 2017), we learned that 6 weeks of mnemonic training at a rate...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
College and inequality
Most college professors are squarely on the left ideologically. They believe that part of their mandate is to reduce inequality, by helping to provide college degrees...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The technology of Logan (2017 Wolverine movie set in 2029)
Last night I went to see Logan, the latest and maybe the last Wolverine movie with Hugh Jackman. The movie is set in 2029. The year 2029 is an interesting choice...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
How many floating-point numbers are in the interval [0,1]?
Most commodity processors support single-precision IEEE 754 floating-point numbers. Though they are ubiquitous, they are often misunderstood. One of my readersContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Tech jobs are already largely automated
Lately, I have been reading a lot about the threat to computer jobs from automation. For example, we have AI systems that can write their own code. And billionaire...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Thoughts on my new laptop (Dell XPS 13 with Windows 10)
I love computers. Unlike many people, who stick to one brand and one operating system, I like to use many different systems. I own several game consoles, several...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
How fast can you count lines?
Inspired by earlier work by Llogiq, I decided to look at how fast I could count the number of lines in a string. By assuming that the string relies on ASCII, UTF...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Sorting sorted arrays in Swift
Sorting arrays quickly is a classical computer science problem. It is also a common task worth optimizing. Sadly, there is no best approach, no silver bullet. Most...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Montreal researchers “prove” that aging is the result of a genetic program
Unless you are a tree, a lobster, or some other sea creature, you are probably aging over time… which is another way of saying that beyond adulthood, your fitness...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Maps and sets can have quadratic-time performance
Swift is a new programming language launched by Apple slightly over two years ago. Like C and C++, it offers ahead-of-time compilation to native code but with many...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
How expensive are the union and intersection of two unordered_set in C++?
If you are using a modern C++ (C++11 or better), you have access to set data structures (unordered_set) which have the characteristics of a hash set. The standard...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Deep learning: the silver bullet?
In 2016, we saw a wide range of breakthroughs having to do with artificial intelligence and deep learning in particular. Google, Facebook, and Baidu announced several...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Resizing arrays can be slow in Swift
Swift a recent high-performance programming language. It is still primarily used develop iOS applications, but it has the potential to be a general-purpose language...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
How quickly can you remove spaces from a string?
Sometimes programmers want to prune out characters from a string of characters. For example, maybe you want to remove all line-ending characters from a piece of...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Best programming language for high performance (January 2017)?
I keep hoping that the field of programming language will evolve. I am a bit tired to program in Java and C… I’d like better languages. I am particularly interested...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog