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
Life is sweeter than you think in 2014…
Jokingly, Rao pointed out that Americans are starting 2014 with an optimistic outlook: (…) it’s tough, but let’s just write off polar bears and groundwater pollution...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
When delegating… consider quality, maintenance and learning
John Cook provides some valuable advice today about when to delegate. An important point he raises is that doing a per-hour analysis makes little sense since human...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Fastest way to compute the greatest common divisor
Given two positive integers x and y, the greatest common divisor (GCD) z is the largest number that divides both x and y. For example, given 64 and 32, the greatest...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
On human intelligence… a perspective from computer science
Whenever I read social scientists, there is often, implicit in the background, the concept of “intelligence” as a well defined quantity. I have some amount of intelligence...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Even faster bitmap decoding
Bitmaps are a simple data structure used to represent sets of integers. For example, you can represent all sets of integers in [0,64) using a single 64-bit integer...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The day I subscribed to a dozen porn sites…
This morning, I noticed some odd charges on my Royal Bank VISA card. They were attributed to sites such as videosupport1.com, bngvsupport.com, paysupport1.com,...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Do we need academic copyright? Some historical perspective
It is commonly believed that we introduced copyright to entice authors into producing lots of quality work by providing them with increased financial incentives...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Is programming as cool as basketball?
Some of the best job prospects are in the software industry. Programming as a career has several benefits worth considering: though not stellar, the pay can be...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
If you are serious about climate change… stop attending conferences?
We know that spending energy tends to release carbon in the atmosphere. In turn this warms up the Earth in the long run. This change might be detrimental. Being...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Are regular folks doomed?
I have been telling all my colleagues about Cowen’s latest book: The average is over. I really enjoyed the book. Cowen goes on in his new book to explain that regular...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Not all citations are equal: identifying key citations automatically
Suppose that you are researching a given issue. Maybe you have a medical condition or you are looking for the best algorithm to solve your current problem. A good...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Life is short: pick good ideas!
Some of us work hard to generate new ideas. All of us train on how to implement ideas. But our days look like this: I have 100 ideas. I write down 50 of them. The...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Who plays nice? Who plays rough?
I have a confession to make. I am one of these people who can’t watch a TV show like Games of throne because there is too much evil. In fact, I generally cringe...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Infinite storage: we are almost there…
Two years ago, I wrote a blog post called What is infinite storage? The blog post was a response to a Physics professor and colleague of mine who objected to my...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
People who make you feel stupid…
In his latest book, David and Goliath, Gladwell points out not everything is as it appears with respect to prestige and strength. For example, when you look at...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
We need more than spam filters: we need bona fide assistants!
I don’t know how other professionals behave, but if you email a researcher at 11pm or even 2am, there is a good chance he will get back to you within two minutes...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Toward Star Trek economics
Characters in the Star Trek universe often claim that their future Earth has abolished money. Everyone gets what he needs and nobody works for money. Unfortunately...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
What are the genuinely useful ideas in programming?
The software industry is probably the most dynamic and innovation of all industries. However, many people also try to convince us to adapt new ideas despite their...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
The written word took over the world
Whereas human beings are geared genetically toward spoken languages, written languages are an acquired ability. In this sense, it is a high-level ability. For centuries...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog