Ben Brubaker has a new Quanta essay Does Computer Science Need Computers?
Despite the title (and authors generally don't choose their titles), Brubaker's essay really addresses the question as to whether computer science is about computers. He starts with Dijkstra's apocryphal quote "Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."
This is the wrong analogy: computers are not the telescopes, they are the stars. You just have to use a broad definition of computer.
The word "computer" goes back to at least 1613. The etymology
- Latin com- meant “together.”
- Putāre meant “to reckon” or “calculate”—and originally “to prune” or “clear up.”
- English added -er, meaning “someone or something that performs an action.”
The word originally meant one who computes, usually referring to a human performing a computational task. Its meaning as a machine didn't come into wide use until the mid-20th century.
I start off every undergraduate theory class I teach with the question "What is a Computer", even in my Foundations of Complexity posts. After some discussion we end up with a diagram like this.
 |
| A Computer |
The computer doesn't need to be electrical, mechanical or biological. You can think of the postal service delivering a letter based on an address, an auction arriving at a price, or even a well that draws water as we pull a rope.
The Church-Turing thesis says the process can always be represented by a Turing machine, and then we are off to the races.
When theoretical computer science stops talking about computing, it just becomes mathematics and no longer computer science. If we want to keep it computer science, we need a computer at the center, some kind of process.
How about the title "Does Computer Science Need Computers?" No, not for electronic computers, though they've become more helpful, especially in this AI era. But doing research in computing is a process in itself. Alan Turing drew inspiration for his machine from thinking about how a mathematician works. So yes, you need a computer for computer science, and a computer for astronomy and every other discipline, even if that computer is just yourself.
computer science analogies:
ReplyDeletethe practice side is closer to civil engineering
the theory of practice side is closer to applied physics
the pure theory side is closer to theoretical physics and math
Lance, now that you have a bit more free time, have you thought about putting together a task force to create a report on the future of computing and computer science and computer science research and teaching and universities?
ReplyDeleteYou are one of the few people who can pull that off with your connections across the field and at ACM/IEEE/... and government and top universities.
It is probably the most important topic of the day and having an in-depth report with diverse views would be extremely helpful for mapping the roads ahead of us and the choices to be made.
Real world processes are by no means "computing"; it is unfettered hubris to call them that!
ReplyDeleteReal world processes are emergent macroscopic phenomena that arise from -autonomous- actions of atomic and subatomic particles. The fine-grained autonomy makes real world processes completely different from (and therefore vastly more interesting to study than) the very tightly orchestrated step-by-step if-this-then-that procedure of a human or electronic computer. When I watch a flock of geese or pelicans the macroscopic effect sure mimics the results of a compute to minimize drag but the way this flocking arises is nothing like that in a flock of drones.
There is no "new physics" that we're missing (how ever much we hope and aspire to find some missing ingredients); it's just the same "old & boring" electrostatics, electromagnetics, quantum mechanics, etc that we've measured and modelled for more than a century. How macroscopic phenomena emerge is forever beyond our (rapidly exhausting fossil-fuelled quantum computing or AI) reach as this requires modeling on the order of octillions of particles even for a tiny fruitfly brain.