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
Accelerating PHP hashing by “unoptimizing” it
Hashing is a software trick that can map strings to fixed-length integers, such as 32-bit integers. It is ubiquitous in modern software. Languages like Java and...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Augmented reality becomes mainstream
My go-to reference lately about the near future has been the 2006 novel Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge. The novel is set in 2025 and the author depicts a world where...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Virtual Reality: First impressions with the HTC Vive
I just got my hands on some virtual-reality (VR) goggles. Specifically, we have an “HTC Vive“. We are still in the early days of VR and given that these goggles...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Fast random shuffling
In a random shuffle, you want to take the elements of a list and reorder them randomly. In a “fair” random shuffle, all possible permutations must be equally likely...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
A fast alternative to the modulo reduction
Suppose you want to pick an integer at random in a set of N elements. Your computer has functions to generate random 32-bit integers, how do you transform suchContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
I do not use a debugger
I learned to program with BASIC back when I was twelve. I would write elaborate programs and run them. Invariably, they would surprise me by failing to do whatContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
How fast is tabulation-based hashing? The downsides of Zobrist…
In practice, hashing is the process of taking an input, such as a string, and turning it into an integer value. It is a fundamental tool in programming, as most...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The strange case of the copyright of open-source software
Economists make a grave mistake when they fail to mention open-source software as one of the critical innovation of our era. Open-source software offers a great...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
To be smart, work on problems you care about
Never do anything that bores you. My experience in science is that someone is always telling to do something that leaves you flat. Bad idea. I’m not good enough...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Enough with the bogus medical studies!
Every week, we hear about how eating such and such food gives cancer, or how working out can save you from a heart attack. If you have been reading these studies...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The surprising cleverness of modern compilers
I wanted to know how a modern C compiler like clang would process the following C code: #include <stdint.h> int count(uint64_t x) { int v = 0; while(x != 0) { x...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
We are passing the Turing test right on schedule
In 1950, the brilliant computing pioneer Alan Turing made the following prediction in his paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence: I believe that in about fifty...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Professors intentionally slow down science to make themselves look better
Recently, the president of the United States announced a big anti-cancer initiative, to be headed by his vice-president Joe Biden. Will it be fruitful? Maybe. But...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Email: how to be polite and efficient
Email is an old platform, but it still represents the cornerstone of most of our work online. Surprisingly, many people seem to be using email poorly. Here areContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Is software a neutral agent?
We face an embarrassing amount of information but when we feel overwhelmed, as Clay Shirky said, “It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure.” Unavoidably...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
We know a lot less than we think, especially about the future.
The inventors of the airplane, the Wright brothers, had little formal education (3 and 4 years of high school respectively). They were not engineers. They wereContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
How will you die? Cancer, Alzheimer’s, Stroke?
Before the 1950s, many of us suffered from poliomyelitis and too many ended up crippled. Then we developed a vaccine and eradicated the disease. Before the second...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The powerful hacker culture
In my post the hacker culture is winning, I observed that the subculture developed in the software industry is infecting the wider world. One such visible culture...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
No more leaks with sanitize flags in gcc and clang
If you are programming in C and C++, you are probably wasting at least some of your time hunting down memory problems. Maybe you allocated memory and forgot toContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog