“It’s an interesting new approach,” says Peter Sanders, who studies the design and implementation of efficient algorithms at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany and who was not involved in the work. “Sorting is still one of the most widely used subroutines in computing,” he says.
DeepMind published its results in Nature today. But the techniques that AlphaDev discovered are already being used by millions of software developers. In January 2022, DeepMind submitted its new sorting algorithms to the organization that manages C++, one of the most popular programming languages in the world, and after two months of rigorous independent vetting, AlphaDev’s algorithms were added to the language. This was the first change to C++’s sorting algorithms in more than a decade and the first update ever to involve an algorithm discovered using AI.
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