algorithms

Andrei Alexandrescu's CppCon 2019 talk revisits sorting, showing how branchless tricks, hybrid strategies and a cost metric can speed up std::sort-style algorithms on modern hardware.

Lex Fridman interviews Donald Knuth about algorithms, complexity, The Art of Computer Programming, and his work habits. The conversation covers his approach to verifying algorithms and how he organises his time.

Chandler Carruth's CppCon 2014 talk on writing fast C++, explaining why data structure choice and memory layout matter more than clever algorithms. It covers why standard containers like unordered_map perform poorly on modern CPUs.

Moleman 2 is a feature-length documentary about the demoscene, tracing its rise from 1980s Commodore 64 culture to modern real-time art. It explains the algorithms and creative process behind demos and intros.

Psychologist Robert Epstein presents a Stanford EE380 colloquium on how internet algorithms such as search rankings can manipulate opinions, purchases and votes at massive scale. He also describes a new monitoring system for tracking such influence.

Guy Steele presents a small geometric problem and compares four computational approaches: a classic sequential solution and three parallel-friendly ones. Each is illustrated pictorially and with working code, weighing total work against time to solution.

Bryan Cantrill presents the ARC (Adaptive Replacement Cache) paper by Megiddo and Modha at Papers We Love. He opens with a survey of caching strategies before digging into the self-tuning LRU/MFU design.

Edward Kmett's 2013 talk at Prezi in Budapest on succinct data structures, which store data in close to the information-theoretic minimum space while supporting fast queries. It ties together the research and walks through his Haskell succinct library.

Stephan T. Lavavej's CppCon 2019 talk on implementing floating-point to_chars and from_chars in Microsoft's C++ STL. It covers the history of float-string conversion and the algorithms that make it much faster.

Martin Kleppmann surveys current research on CRDTs, the algorithms for merging concurrent edits across offline replicas. He covers the hard parts such as rich text, moves and merge results that are technically correct but poor.

Andrei Alexandrescu's ACCU 2016 talk previews material from his book on writing fast code, with a focus on optimization techniques such as sentinels and faster search.

Python core developer Raymond Hettinger explains how Python's dictionary implementation evolved into the compact, ordered dict in Python 3.6. He uses pictures and small bits of pure Python, and covers key-sharing, compaction and versioning.

Juan Pedro Bolivar Puente explains immutable and persistent data structures in C++ and how they support value semantics. He presents the Immer library, rrb-trees, and a prototype text editor that opens a huge file instantly.

Donald Knuth's 2017 Christmas Tree Lecture at Stanford about a combinatorial geometry problem whose computed numbers matched a striking formula. He tells the story of the conjecture and its sequel.

A feature-length Defunctland documentary on the history of Disney's FastPass and FastPass+ expedited queue systems. It covers how the systems evolved and how they were designed, with simulation of their effects on park lines.

Sean Parent's CppCon 2015 talk on better use of standard containers and the goal of having no incidental data structures. It argues that proper containers can greatly simplify code.

Elasticsearch engineer and Lucene committer Adrien Grand explains the design decisions inside a Lucene index and what problems it can and cannot solve. The talk goes into how Lucene stores data for fast search and analytics.

Sean Parent's GoingNative 2013 talk surveys new and overlooked C++ features and shows how to use them for simple, correct, clear code. It stresses using standard algorithms rather than raw loops.

Erik Demaine's MIT 6.851 Advanced Data Structures lecture introducing succinct data structures, covering rank, select and tries. It is part of the Spring 2012 course.

Malte Skarupke's C++Now 2018 talk on hash table performance, explaining why std::unordered_map is slow and memory hungry and presenting faster designs, including his bytell hash map.

A Microsoft Research talk on BetrFS, a file system built on B-epsilon trees, a write-optimized data structure. It covers WODS such as LSM-trees, how to design a file system around them, and benchmark wins over ext4 and xfs.

An 88-minute Microsoft Research talk that explains how quantum computers beat classical ones using basic linear algebra, qubits, superposition and gates. It works through the Deutsch oracle problem and ends with entanglement, teleportation and a live demo.

Daniel J. Bernstein and Tanja Lange survey recent highlights in post-quantum cryptography at 35C3, covering the NIST competition, network protocol experiments, and broken candidates.

Robert Smith of Rigetti Computing talks at a Bay Area Lisp and Scheme meetup about using Common Lisp for quantum computing. He covers the technical, sociological and psychological sides of working across disciplines.

A 2013 lecture in which Vitalik Buterin explains what quantum computers are and what they can and cannot do. He then discusses what they could mean for Bitcoin's cryptography.

A 2007 Google Tech Talk introducing Polyworld, an artificial life simulator used to evolve artificial intelligence by designing worlds rather than minds. It presents results from ongoing attempts to evolve intelligent behavior.

The full-length Numberphile interview with mathematician and hedge fund founder Jim Simons. He discusses his path from mathematics and codebreaking to founding Renaissance Technologies, his use of algorithms in markets, and his philanthropy.

Damian Conway's hour-long keynote at the Perl conference, On the Shoulders of Giants, showing off Perl 6 (Raku) features with history, algorithms and a quantum math operator built with grammars. It is delivered with comic flair.

Conal Elliott presents his paper on automatic differentiation, deriving a simple, generalized AD algorithm from a natural specification. Varying the representation of derivatives yields forward and reverse mode algorithms that avoid the complexity and statefulness of backpropagation.

Chandler Carruth walks through tuning C++ performance, from writing benchmarks to analyzing results on real CPUs and compilers. It focuses on small-scale problems such as loop kernels, data structures and algorithms, and on keeping compilers from optimizing benchmarks away.

The first lecture of David MacKay's Cambridge course on information theory, pattern recognition and neural networks. It introduces the core ideas of his book Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms.

Guy Steele's Strange Loop 2010 talk argues that programmers should not have to think about parallelism, and that languages should support algorithms built on independence and divide-and-conquer. He also recounts fitting a program onto a single punch card.