of computer science, there is perhaps no more fundamental task than to sort. Bubble, heap, merge—take your pick. The methods for reordering data inside a computer have been theorized to death, served as practice exercises for millions of novices, and been optimized for decades by expert developers. Type a sort function in any programming language, and it’s code you can rely on. Don’t touch it. It already works great.
The experiment worked. Since April of last year, C++ has been running slightly faster, thanks to a new set of AI-concocted sorting algorithms. But according to AlphaDev’s engineers, who, that’s just the first step. “We want to optimize the entire computing stack,” says Daniel Mankowitz, a staff research scientist at Deepmind who led the sorting project. Mankowitz says that AlphaDev has already improved algorithms not just for sorting, but also for other basic tasks like hashing.