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 (August 4th, 2018)
About 80% of the ocean remains unmapped and unexplored. Even a mild concussion (a fall on your head) can double your risk of dementia (e.g., Alzheimer’s). Apple...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Getting 4 bytes or a full cache line: same speed or not?
Many software operations are believed to be “memory bound”, meaning that the processor spins empty while waiting for data to come from memory. To compensate, our...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (July 27th, 2018)
It is frequently argued that intelligence requires great complexity. But complex compared to what? To put things in perspective, my friend Leonid points out that...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Writing about software and building software are different jobs
Code taken from a blog post is meant to illustrate an idea. Blogging is literature, not engineering. Don’t build production systems by copying and pasting random...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
It is more complicated than I thought: -mtune, -march in GCC
My favourite C compilers are GNU GCC and LLVM’s Clang. In C, you compile for some architecture. Thus you have to tell the compiler what kind of machine you have...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Are vectorized random number generators actually useful?
Our processors benefit from “SIMD” instructions. These instructions can operate on several values at once, thus greatly accelerating some algorithms. Earlier, I...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (July 21st, 2018)
It seems that something called “Cartesian Genetic Programming” could be a match for Deep Learning. If you look at the best paid individuals in most fields, most...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Accelerating Conway’s Game of Life with SIMD instructions
Conway’s Game of Life is one of the simplest non-trivial simulation one can program. It simulates the emergence of life from chaos. Though the rules are simple,...
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