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Keynote Talk: Algorithm Improvement: How Fast Has It Been and How Much Farther Can It Go?

Published: 11 July 2022 Publication History

Abstract

In this talk, I report on a large-scale census of algorithm improvement spanning 11 sub-fields of computer science, 57 textbooks and more than 1,100 research papers.
Across 113 algorithm problems, we find enormous variation in how fast algorithms have improved. Around half experience little or no improvement. At the other extreme, 13% experience transformative improvements, radically changing how and where they can be used. Overall, we find that, for moderate-sized problems, 30% to 45% of algorithmic problems had improvements comparable or greater than those that users experienced from Moore's Law and other hardware advances.
I will also discuss our comparison of the upper bounds and lower bounds for these algorithm problems, where we find that nearly two-thirds are already asymptomatically optimal --- representing a triumph for the field, but also a challenge for future progress.

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  1. Keynote Talk: Algorithm Improvement: How Fast Has It Been and How Much Farther Can It Go?

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      SPAA '22: Proceedings of the 34th ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures
      July 2022
      464 pages
      ISBN:9781450391467
      DOI:10.1145/3490148
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      Published: 11 July 2022

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      Author Tags

      1. algorithm development
      2. computer progress
      3. lower bounds
      4. time complexity

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      SPAA '22
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      Overall Acceptance Rate 447 of 1,461 submissions, 31%

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      SPAA '25
      37th ACM Symposium on Parallelism in Algorithms and Architectures
      July 28 - August 1, 2025
      Portland , OR , USA

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