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
Vectorized trimming of line comments
A French graduate student reached out by email yesterday with the following problem. Consider a format such as TOML which has line comments: when a ‘#’ character...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (April 22 2023)
There are many theories regarding what biological aging. Animals can differ by up to six orders of magnitude (100000x) in longevity. Some animal species like the...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Will emerging artificial intelligence boost research productivity?
Bryan Caplan, an economist, raised an interesting question on Twitter: why aren’t people celebrating the fact that tools like GPT might soon allow us to produce...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Defining interfaces in C++: concepts versus inheritance
In a previous blog post, I showed how you could define ‘an interface’ in C++ using concepts. For example, I can specify that a type should have the methods has_next...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (April 15 2023)
Some university professor include ‘trigger warnings’ in their course material, to warn students that potentially disturbing content may be encountered. According...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Interfaces are not free in Go
We are all familiar with the concept even if we are not aware of it: when you learn about arithmetic in school, you use the same mathematical symbols whether you...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
19 random digits is not enough to uniquely identify all human beings
Suppose that you assigned everyone an 19 digit number. What is the probability that two human beings would have the same number? It is an instance of the Birthday...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Consider using constexpr static function variables for performance in C++
When programming, we often need constant variables that are used within a single function. For example, you may want to look up characters from a table. The following...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (March 11 2023)
Robert Metcalfe won the Turing Award (the ‘Computer Science Nobel Prize’) for his work on early networking. According to DBLP, Metcalfe published 11 journal articles...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Programming-language popularity by GitHub pull requests
GitHub is probably the most popular software repository in the world. One important feature on GitHub is the ‘pull request’: we often contribute to a piece of software...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Are your memory-bound benchmarking timings normally distributed?
When optimizing software, we routinely measure the time that takes a given function or task. The typical assumption is that we get a normal distribution, and so...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
What are we going to do about ChatGPT?
Generative artificial intelligence, and in particular ChatGPT, has taken the world by storm. Some intellectuals are proposing we create a worldwide ban on advanced...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
C++20: consteval and constexpr functions
Optimizing compilers seek try to push as much of the computation as possible at compile time. In modern C++, you can declare a function as ‘constexpr’, meaningContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Can GPT pass my programming courses?
Professeur Caplan reports that ChatGPT, the new AI that is all the rage, can pass his economics midterm and get an A. What about computer science ? I submittedContinue...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Counting cycles and instructions on ARM-based Apple systems
In my blog post Counting cycles and instructions on the Apple M1 processor, I showed how we could have access to “performance counters” to count how many cycles...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Runtime asserts are not free
When writing software in C and C++, it is common to add C asserts to check that some conditions are satisfied at runtime. Often, it is a simple comparison between...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Science and Technology links (March 11 2023)
In 1500, China was the largest economy in the world, followed by India and France. The USA did not exist yet. In 1700, 4% of human beings lived in France. In the...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Trimming spaces from strings faster with SVE on an Amazon Graviton 3 processor
Programmers sometimes need to trim, or remove, characters, such as spaces from strings. It might be a surprising expensive task. In C, the following function is...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog
Float-parsing benchmark: Regular Visual Studio, ClangCL and Linux GCC
Windows users have choices when it comes to C++ programming. You may choose to stick with the regular Visual Studio. If you prefer, Microsoft makes available ClangCL...
From Daniel Lemire's Blog