[HN Gopher] The Future of Computer Science (2018)
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The Future of Computer Science (2018)
Author : couchand
Score : 18 points
Date : 2024-03-25 16:24 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (dr-knz.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (dr-knz.net)
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| I remain unconvinced, but maybe LLM's will provide progress
| without individual comprehension?
|
| (at which point we should maybe be speaking of Applied
| Computation rather than Computer Science? then again, at systems
| institutions that Rubicon has already been crossed...)
| Supermancho wrote:
| Anything that cannot be grasped by an individual, cannot be
| taught. This means the gains that are emergent, will eventually
| be lost.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| > A famous researcher once said that a scientist should not work
| more than 5-6 years in the same research area.
|
| Who said this?
| linguae wrote:
| I first encountered similar advice when reading the slides of
| David Patterson's talk "How to Have a Bad Career in
| Research/Academia" as an undergraduate in the late 2000s who
| was planning a career in computer science research:
|
| https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~pattrsn/talks/BadCareer.pd...
| cion wrote:
| It might be Paul Halmos. In his "automathobiography", titled _I
| Want to Be a Mathematician_ (Springer 1985), page 156: "In the
| late 1940's I began to act on one of my beliefs: to stay young,
| you have to change fields every five years". He goes on saying
| "I didn't first discover it and then act on it, but instead,
| noting that I did in fact seem to change directions every so
| often, I made a virtue out of a fact and formulated it as a
| piece of wisdom".
| d_silin wrote:
| Note the downward trend in the number of new programming
| languages per decade. Probably because this field of CS has
| reached maturity stage and new greenfield projects are less in
| demand.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_programming_langua...
| tromp wrote:
| Those are only the "notable" languages. If we consider less
| than notable languages as well, we might get something like the
| languages on Rosetta Code [1]. Looking throught the history of
| that page, I see that about 10% of the current 834 languages
| were added in just the last 5 years. Which is much less
| suggestive of a downward trend.
|
| [1]
| https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Rosetta_Code/Rank_languages_by_...
| sideshowb wrote:
| This thesis seems to be limited to a narrow corner of computer
| science akin to Turing's work: what is computable, etc.
|
| Lucky for us that's only a narrow corner I guess?
| bawolff wrote:
| I feel like this is looking at things through the wrong lens and
| forcing them to fit in an uncomfortable way.
|
| Do interactive incentive based protocols like bitcoin (or even
| bittorrent) provide a fascinating and fundamentally different
| design space than traditional algorithms operating on input and
| returning output?
|
| Sure, i'll grant that.
|
| Are Turing machines the right abstraction to model them? No
| probably not.
|
| Does that mean the church-turing thesis is a barrier to progress?
|
| This is where the post lost me. I'd go with obviously not. The
| church-turing thesis isn't even very important for normal real-
| world algorithm development unless you are wondering if your
| program halts. It seems obvious here that that is not the
| barrier.
|
| That said, I think there is a thread of truth here that our
| current models of computation aren't sufficient to capture
| interactive protocols where ecconomic or behavioural incentives
| play a significant role. I'd even agree that to really make such
| protocols, we have to understand the space better, and we can
| only do that by being able to model it.
|
| I don't know if i really disagree so much as dislike the way the
| author presents it. I feel like the author is giving some
| metaphysical importance to turing machines and their relation to
| the soul and the unknowableness of the other. All this borderline
| religious mubo jumbo obscures what is really going on.
|
| i just see this as a case where all models are wrong but some
| models are useful. Algorithms where economic/behavioural effects
| matter need to use a model informed by fields like psychology,
| sociology, economics etc (i want to say psychohistory) and not
| pure computer science. That's all.
|
| Sure, we need more work to find such models, but its not a
| fundamental shift. We do that all the time when modelling new
| phenomenon.
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