When good enough is better
“It used to be that people used computers for computations where there was a single, hard, logical right answer,” says Martin Rinard, a professor of computer science at MIT. “Now, the landscape is changing.” When you do a Google search, for instance, the exact order of the first few results may not matter as much as getting an answer quickly. In the Internet age, when Web servers are performing computations for thousands of users at once, and sending the results across thousands of miles optical fiber, programs that can efficiently find adequate solutions to a problem are often preferable to ones that inefficiently find the perfect solution.Researchers in Rinard’s group at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory have developed a system that automatically looks through computer code for areas where a little bit of accuracy can be traded for significant increases in speed. In one set of tests, the...