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 (November 28th 2020)
Homework favours kids with wealthier and better educated parents. My own kids have access to two parents with a college education, including a father who is publishing...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
How fast does interpolation search converge?
When searching in a sorted array, the standard approach is to rely on a binary search. If the input array contains N elements, after log(N) + 1 random queries in...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The disagreeable scientist conjecture
If you are a nerd, the Internet is a candy store… if only you stay away from mainstream sites. Some of the best scientists have blogs, YouTube channels, they post...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Programming is social
Software programming looks at a glance like work done best done in isolation. Nothing could be further from the truth in my experience. Though you may be working...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Double-blind peer review is a bad idea
When you submit a manuscript to a journal or to a conference, you do not know who reviews your manuscript. Increasingly, due to concerns with biases and homophily...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (November 14th 2020)
COVID 19 forced enterprises to move to remote work. There has been decades of research showing that allowing workers to work remotely improves job satisfactionContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5: early impressions
This week, my family got a copy of each new major game console: the Microsoft Xbox Series X and the Sony PlayStation 5. I haven’t yet had time to try them out well...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Benchmarking theorem provers for programming tasks: yices vs. z3
One neat family of tools that most programmers should know about are “theorem provers”. If you went to college in computer science, you may have been exposed to...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
How will the pandemic impact software programming jobs?
Software programming is not for everyone, but among the careers that are mostly unregulated, and thus mostly free from rents, it has consistently been one of the...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (October 31st 2020)
Amazon has 1 million employees. “The iPhone 12 contains a Lidar. The first 3D Lidar was released a decade ago and cost $75,000.” (Calum Chace) There is water on...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
What the heck is the value of “-n % n” in programming languages?
When coding efficient algorithms having to do with hashing, random number generations or even cryptography, a common construction is the expression “-n%n“. My experience...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Ridiculously fast unicode (UTF-8) validation
One of the most common “data type” in programming is the text string. When programmers think of a string, they imagine that they are dealing with a list or an array...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (October 17th 2020)
Computer vision (i.e., artificial intelligence) and cameras are used in London to monitor citizens with respect to social distancing. A fecal transplant from old...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Why is 0.1 + 0.2 not equal to 0.3?
In most programming languages, the value 0.1 + 0.2 differs from 0.3. Let us try it out in Node (JavaScript): > 0.1 + 0.2 == 0.3 false Yet 1 + 2 is equal to 3. Why...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (October 3rd 2020)
The mortality rate for kids under five have fallen by 60% since 1990. Samsung new storage drives are both affordable and really fast (up to 7GB/s). Alzheimer’sContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
How expensive is integer-overflow trapping in C++?
Integers in programming languages have a valid range but arithmetic operations can result in values that exceed such ranges. For example, adding two large integers...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (September 19th 2020)
A large city dating back 4,300 years has been discovered in China. It predates the Chinese civilization. At its center was a wide pyramid supporting a 20-acre palace...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Parsing floats in C++: benchmarking strtod vs. from_chars
Programmers often need to convert a string into a floating-point numbers. For example, you might get the string “3.1416” and you would like to get the resulting...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Good students find questions, not answers
It is often believed that learning is a simple matter of collecting answers and replies. I suspect that “learn mechanistically how to answer the questions” isContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog