Deepmind Alphadev: Faster sorting algorithms discovered using deep RL

Early in my career, I had a really good career going. I paid a lot of attention to writing fast code.

Some of that career was in a Navy lab, and some of the people there wrote fast code by going down to the assembly language and checking each instruction, load, store, etc.

At times that career bumped into some math -- 0-1 integer linear programming, even ordinary linear programming, optimization, e.g., BFGS as elsewhere in this thread, the fast Fourier transform, power spectral estimation, optimal control, stochastic optimal control, classic linear statistics, non-parametric statistics, ill-conditioned matrices, on and on. So, to get a better background in the math, I put my career on hold and went for a Ph.D. in pure/applied math.

In my first semester the faculty wanted me to take their first ugrad computing course. Heck, I'd already taught such a course at/for Georgetown U. But I took the course anyway.

Then in the course, the issue of fast code came up. Soon, by some of the computer science faculty interested in computational complexity, I got slapped around like a butterfly in a hurricane.

Yup, one way, commonly the way first seen, to write fast code is to check each machine instruction, pay attention to caches, locality of reference, etc.

But another way to write fast code is to back off, basically forget about the individual instructions, etc. and take as the criterion number of comparisons of pairs of keys. Right, just f'get about all those other details of the hardware, just what the compiler did with do-while and if-then-else, etc. That's what was catching on, strongly, in computer science at the time.

Sooo, broadly that's two quite different ways to look at how to write fast code.

The Gleason bound? That's in one of the D. Knuth volumes The Art of Computer Programming. That was A. Gleason, a math prof at Harvard with a spectacular career -- before his Ph.D., solved one of D. Hilbert's famous problems intended to keep mathematicians occupied for the 20th century, was made a Harvard Fellow, joined the math faculty, and never bothered with a Ph.D.

Gleason started with, for any given positive integer n, we will be sorting n keys. Sooooo, how big of a problem is that? Well (from my memory and not looking up my copy of Knuth on a shelf just behind me), assume the keys are distinct, that is, no ties. Then the problem is sorting all n! permutations of the n distinct keys. Then, ... Gleason argued from just counting the permutations and assuming that the sorting was by comparing pairs of keys, that on average could not sort in fewer than O(n log n) such comparisons. So, Gleason just counts comparisons and ignores number of parallel processors, number of levels of cache memories, the details of the instruction set of the processor(s), .... Then, as I recall, Knuth continues on and argues that heap sort achieves the Gleason bound both on average and worst case. Sooooo, in that context, heap sort is the fastest possible.

Right: The class could have had a contest, who can write code for the fastest sort on a certain list of, say, 10,000 names. Some people use quick sort, heap sort, radix sort, shell sort, bubble sort, ....

No telling who will win. Even if several students use heap sort, no telling.

So what CAN we tell? As n grows, even some really inefficient coding, maybe even in an interpretive language, will totally blow away like that butterfly in a hurricane ANY coding of bubble sort. And as I recall, it's possible for quick sort to lose on some permutations unless the partitions are selected carefully -- that is, the worst case performance of some versions of quick sort can fail to achieve the Gleason bound and run slower than even a very inefficient coding of heap sort.

That is, if want to take Gleason's approach, just count comparisons of pairs of keys and look at the big-O results, can't beat heap sort.

A short answer is, if win in the big-O comparison, then, no matter how sloppy the coding, for all sufficiently large n, still will win no matter how measure speed. In short, that's the reason people took big-O very seriously.

Yes, there is more to computational complexity than I've outlined here, and as I've already mentioned, in some contexts there can be more to sorting.

Still, again, in short, in simple terms, in a very important sense, Gleason was right, can't beat the Gleason bound, and can't beat heap sort.

I just wanted to improve my career. I never wanted to be a college professor, teacher, researcher, etc., yet for various reasons I've done all those things.

Now "to improve my career", I want to be a successful entrepreneur. My startup? It might flop, and I can't be sure it won't. But it might be worth $100 billion, and I can't say it won't. Here I've made a little contribution to the teaching of computing, coding, and computer science of sorting. But I'm no college professor. Back to my startup. A Chaired Professor of Applied Math? I don't want to occupy one. If my startup is really successful, maybe I'll fund one.

This made me think “imagine if AI was the compiler”, that is to say you went from C or whatever to assembly via AI directly so it was “hand writing” the equivalent assembly for your instructions instead of using generic compilation.

We might find everything runs much faster.