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
Revisiting “Holy Fire” (Bruce Sterling, 1996)
Bruce Sterling in a famous scifi novelist. One of his most celebrated novels was written 20 years ago: Holy Fire. It is a near-future novel, set in the late XXIst...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Pac-Man running at 1 million frames per second
In What does technology want?, Kevin Kelly argued that technology is on an evolutionary path. In some real sense, technology is alive and growing. It seeks outContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
My most popular posts in 2015 (part II)
Techno-optimism For several years now, I have grown more optimistic about the power of human innovation. Despite the barrage of bad news, the fact is that we are...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
My most popular posts in 2015… (part I)
Programming If you want the world to get progressively better, you have to do your part. Programmers can’t wait passively for hardware to get better. We need to...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Your software should follow your hardware: the CLHash example
The new Intel Skylake processors released this year (2015) have been met with disappointment. It is widely reported that they improved over the two years old Haswell...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The courage to face what we do not understand
Sadly, it is easy to forget that what we know is all but a tiny fraction of all there is to know. Human beings naturally focus on what they understand. The more...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The virtuous circle of fantasy
It has long been observed that progress depends on the outliers among us. Shaw’s quote sounds a true today as it did in the past: “The reasonable man adapts himself...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Amazing technologies from the year 2015…
I cannot predict the future, but I can look at the recent past. What happened in 2015 as far as technology is concerned? Many things happened that, had I predicted...
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