Serious Sorting
While the phrase “Let’s play a game” usually conjures something horrible from films, in this case, it’s a strategy being used by Google researchers to redeploy Google’s AlphaZero to more useful applications. They’re calling it AlphaDev.
In this instance, they’ve turned to gamifying sorting algorithms to see if it could before better than the dozens of sorting algorithms out there. The result is a new algorithm that is 70% faster for short sorts and 1.7% faster for long sorts. That can add up to incredible savings in compute power and energy.
You can check out the video by Two Minute Papers on the topic:
While many other findings from DeepMind have hypothetical benefits for “some point in the future” the new method for sorting has already been published and is being used by devs today. That means the calculation time and energy savings might be significant.
Gamification has been applied to many aspects of human work. Can we get more points than yesterday? Who’s on the leaderboard? Can I team up with others to beat them? Maybe AI can also be enticed through competitive to come up with creative solutions?
Just please nobody try to create a paperclip making competition…
