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 10th 2021)
We use CRISPR, a state-of-the-art gene editing technique, to edit the genes of live human patients in a clinical trials. A clinical trial has begun concerning an...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Compressing JSON: gzip vs zstd
JSON is the de facto standard for exchanging data on the Internet. It is relatively simple text format inspired by JavaScript. I say “relatively simple” because...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (June 26th 2021)
Reportedly, half of us own a smartphone. It is often reported that women or visible minority earn less money. However, ugly people are doing comparatively evenContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
How long should you work on a problem ?
Lev Reyzin says that working too long on a problem might be unproductive: I, personally, have diminishing (or negative?) returns to my creative work as I explicitly...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (June 12th 2021)
We completed the sequencing of the human genome. AstraZeneca’s drug Lynparza cut combined risk of recurrence of breast cancer or death by 42% among women in study...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Computing the number of digits of an integer even faster
I my previous blog post, I documented how one might proceed to compute the number of digits of an integer quickly. E.g., given the integer 999, you want 3 but given...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Computing the number of digits of an integer quickly
Suppose I give you an integer. How many decimal digits would you need to write it out? The number ‘100’ takes 3 digits whereas the number ’99’ requires only two...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
All Models are Wrong
All models are wrong, but some are useful is a common saying in statistics. It does not merely apply to statistics, however. It is general observation. Box (1976)...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (May 22nd 2021)
Most computer chips today in flagship phones and computers use a process based on a 5 nm or larger resolution. Finer resolutions usually translate into lower energy...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Counting the number of matching characters in two ASCII strings
Suppose that you give me two ASCII strings having the same number of characters. I wish to compute efficiently the number of matching characters (same position,...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Converting binary integers to ASCII characters: Apple M1 vs AMD Zen2
Programmers often need to write integers as characters. Thus given the 32-bit value 1234, you might need a function that writes the characters 1234. We can useContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (May 15th 2021)
There were rainforests near the south pole 90 million years ago. Though commercial exchanges are typically win-win for both the buyer and the seller, people tend...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Constructing arrays of Boolean values in Java
It is not uncommon that we need to represent an array of Boolean (true or false) values. There are multiple ways to do it. The most natural way could be to construct...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The benefits of locality in random access
Modern computers have several layers of memory, from fast cache (sometimes called L1) all the way to main memory (RAM). A lot of performance-critical code relies...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (May 1st 2021)
Growing your own food could lower your carbon footprint by 3-5%. In recent years, we have acquired the ability to measure biological age: your chronological age...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Ideal divisors: when a division compiles down to just a multiplication
The division instruction is one of the most expensive instruction in your CPU. Thus optimizing compilers often compile divisions by known constants down to a multiplication...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Some useful regular expressions for programmers
In my blog post, My programming setup, I stressed how important regular expressions are to my programming activities. Regular expressions can look intimidatingContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
A trichotomy of intellectual activity
I like to separate intellectual work among three categories: Emulation: the reproduction or direct application of existing ideas. Most academic work and maybe most...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (April 17th 2021)
Moderna built their COVID 19 vaccine without having the virus on site. They viewed it as a software problem. Human and mice with red hair have elevated pain thresholds...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog