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 11th, 2017)
It looks like the Java programming language might finally get in-language support for vector instructions, these instructions are supported by modern processors...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (August 4th, 2017)
Lifting a lot of small weights and eating protein regularly builds muscle mass. There is no need for heavy weights and hormones matter less than you think. There...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (July 27th, 2017)
Currently, damage to the retina is largely viewed as irreversible. However, some researchers were able to generate retinal cells in mice. Toyota is reportedly ready...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (July 21st, 2017)
Want proof that you live in the future? Ok. There is this “cryptocurrency” called ethereum and it is causing a shortage of microprocessors: Demand from Ethereum...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
What is “modern” programming?
As a young teenager, I dabbled with basic and some assembly. Things got serious when I learned Turbo Pascal. “Now we are talking”, I thought. Turbo Pascal offered...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (July 14th, 2017)
PC shipments are at the lowest level of the last 10 years, and they have been declining for the last two years. Using smartphone data, researchers are able forContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Pruning spaces faster on ARM processors with Vector Table Lookups
Last week, I asked how fast one could remove spaces from a string using ARM processors. On a particular benchmark, I got 2.4 cycles per byte using regular (scalar)...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (July 7th, 2017)
People magazine recently named Julia Roberts, who is 49, as the World’s Most Beautiful Woman. Volvo plans to commercialize self-driving cars in 2020, and all electric...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Are your strings immutable?
A value is immutable if it cannot change. Immutability is a distinct notion than that of a constant. The speed of light in a vacuum is believed to be a universal...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Pruning spaces from strings quickly on ARM processors
Suppose that I give you a relatively long string and you want to remove all spaces from it. In ASCII, we can define spaces as the space character (‘ ‘), and the...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (July 1st, 2017)
Canada is 150 years old today. The iPhone is 10 years old this year. We can safely say that the iPhone 7 is over a hundred times faster, in almost every way than...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Video game review… Nier: Automata
Single-player RPG games are having a tough time. Last year I reviewed Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. Though I felt it was an excellent game, it was not a commercialContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (June 23rd, 2017)
Elon Musk, Making Humans a Multi-Planetary Species, New Space. June 2017, 5(2): 46-61. Reportedly, Ikea is working on augmented reality software that would allow...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Top speed for top-k queries
Suppose that I give you a stream of values and you want to maintain the top-k smallest or largest values. You could accumulate all these values, sort them all and...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (June 16th, 2017)
How much bandwidth do we have? It seems that each of our eyes has 1 megabyte per second. That’s about 100GB per day assuming you close one of your eyes and youContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
QuickSelect versus binary heap for top-k queries
In a previous post, I considered the problem of finding the k smallest (or k largest) elements from a stream of values. The naive approach is to collect all the...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (June 9th, 2017)
This week, Apple told us about two new interesting pieces of technology. On the one hand, we have ARKit. It makes it easy for developers to build and deploy “augmented...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Quickly returning the top-k elements: computer science vs. the real world
A standard problem in computer science is to quickly return the smallest or largest K elements of a list. If the list is made of N elements, then we can solve this...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (June 2nd, 2017)
Methylene blue rejuvenates old skin. You can buy methylene blue on Amazon and spray it on your face. It is reportedly safe, even in high concentration. Of course...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog