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 15th, 2018)
The majority of people dying are 80 years old or older. A heart-disease drug can partially reverse type 1 diabetes. We can at least partially reverse age-related...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Are fungi making us sick?
Fungi are everywhere. Yeasts, molds, mushrooms. We eat them. They live on our skin. But are they making us sick? That’s a theory strongly held by Martin Laurence...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (July 6th, 2018)
In the United Kingdom, only a tiny minority of high school female students take computer science (0.4% in 2017). Physics is ten times more popular. Russians once...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
How quickly can you compute the dot product between two large vectors?
A dot (or scalar) product is a fairly simple operation that simply sums the many products: float sum = 0; for (size_t i = 0; i < len; i++) { sum += x1[i] * x2[i]...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Income, wealth, intelligence and the fall of the American empire
Arcand‘s latest movie (the Fall of the American Empire) depicts a young man (Pierre-Paul Daoust) who is supposedly very intelligent, but not very wealthy. The movie...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Predicting the truncated xorshift32* random number generator
Software programmers need random number generators. For this purpose, the often use functions with outputs that appear random. Gerstmann has a nice post about Better...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (June 29th, 2018)
Hogarth imagines that artificial intelligence (AI) could progress much faster than we might anticipate due to what he calls “AI nationalism”: I believe that the...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Data processing on modern hardware
If you had to design a new database system optimized for the hardware we have today, how would you do it? And what is the new hardware you should care about? This...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (June 24th, 2018)
Video gamers may soon be paid more than top pro athletes. Meanwhile, if you want to stand out in a crowd of university professors, point out that you are a fanContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Roaring Bitmaps in JavaScript
Roaring bitmaps are a popular data structure to represents sets of integers. Given such sets, you can quickly compute unions, intersections, and so forth. It is...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (June 15th, 2018)
The market for artificial-intelligence chips could reach $30bn by 2022. My guess is that NVIDIA (a graphics card maker) is the big winner, their tag line is now...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Emojis, Java and Strings
Emojis are funny characters that are becoming increasingly popular. However, they are probably not as simple as you might thing when you are a programmer. For a...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (June 9th, 2018)
A woman with late-stage breast cancer has been successfully cured using immunotherapy. She was preparing to die. She is now going to live hopefully many more years...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Vectorizing random number generators for greater speed: PCG and xorshift128+ (AVX-512 edition)
Most people designing random number generators program using regular code. If they are aiming for speed, they probably write functions in C. However, our processors...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (June 2nd, 2018)
Human hearts do not regenerate. Cardiovascular diseases are the leading cause of death in occident. Japanese doctors will graft sheets of tissue derived from reprogrammed...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Greater speed in memory-bound graph algorithms with just straight C code
Graph algorithms are often memory bound. When you visit a node, there is no reason to believe that its neighbours are located nearby in memory. In an earlier post...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (May 26th, 2018)
Teicholz argues that Nutrition Science is Not Up to the Task: Despite methodological advances, nutritional epidemiology remains fundamentally limited by its observational...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Gender and peer review
Modern science works in the following manner. You do the research. You write a paper. You publish the paper. For historical reasons, “publishing the paper” typically...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Graph algorithms and software prefetching
A lot of data in the real world can be represented as graphs: you have nodes connected through vertices. For example, you are a node in a graph where friendships...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog