Thursday, June 08, 2023

Google's AlphaDev discovers sorting algorithms that can revolutionize computing foundations

Good news! Exciting! Sorting algorithms may sound mundane, but they are ubiquitous "workhorses" and very important millions of times a day!

Very nice! Google makes this new algorithm available to the public for free!

"Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) research lab DeepMind has achieved a remarkable feat in computer science through its latest AI system, AlphaDev. This specialized version of AlphaZero has made a significant breakthrough by uncovering faster sorting and hashing algorithms, which are essential processes utilized trillions of times daily by developers worldwide for data sorting, storage and retrieval.

In a paper published today in the science journal Nature, DeepMind asserts that AlphaDev’s newly discovered algorithm achieves a 70% increase in efficiency for sorting short sequences of elements and approximately 1.7% for sequences surpassing 250,000 elements, as compared to the algorithms in the C++ library. ...
The company also announced its intention to make the new algorithms available through the LLVM libc++ standard sorting library, aiming to empower millions of developers and companies in diverse industries. Significantly, this update represents the first revision to this section of the sorting library in over a decade and the initial inclusion of an algorithm developed through reinforcement learning. ..."

P.S. I am afraid the VentureBeat news article cited the wrong Nature article as it seems to unrelated to the subject!

Deepmind's AlphaDev discovers sorting algorithms that can revolutionize computing foundations | VentureBeat

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