>One of the ways to help make computer science respectable is to show that is deeply rooted in history, not just a short-lived phenomenon. Therefore it is natural to turn to the earliest surviving documents which deal with computation, and to study how people approached the subject nearly 4000 years ago.
Dijkstra: "Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." (Since nobody's said it explicitly and in case you were referencing it.)
That is, telescopes are, in practice, the most common way to learn about stars(/celstial bodies), but the stars are the target of study, with telescopes an incidental tool.
Computer science is about e.g. resource scaling for solving particular problems, with electronic computers just being one way those insights can be applied.
That Dijkstra's phrase is genius because at first sight it just seems a pedantic point made by the professor, a_boutade_ if you will, but the more you think about it the truer it is, even obvious.
He explains that Computer Science is a terrible name – it's not a science, and "not about computers in the same sense that physics is not really about particle accelerators, and biology is not really about microscopes and petri dishes".
Computer isn’t just the device though, it’s the activity. Before electronic computers, computer was a job, people were hired to be computers so it’s more like calling astronomy “Astronomer Science”. Still awkward, but not quite so silly.
The more I read about math history the less I care about electronic computers. There was a lot of interesting problems and abstractions even 400 years ago. I find it funny that these people had no choice but to understand large and complex with nothing but pen and paper.. and it seems like the less computing power the smarter the thinking.
> I find it funny that these people had no choice but to understand large and complex with nothing but pen and paper.
Some took it even further. The reason Plato gives for why Socrates wrote nothing down is that writing is an aid to memory and a form of crutch for the mind. And just as walking around on crutches will weaken a healthy man’s legs over time, so will leaning on writing weaken his memory.
right i remember this, it was framed as a history of anti-tech and purism .. in any case I think most brains, even the smartest will need a bit of storage to avoid looping around old ideas that were proven wrong hence paper
Was your use of this example a reference to Steve Job's referring of the computer as the "Bicycle of the mind"? I think he might have been quoting Stewart Brand.
Definitely extending the usefulness of the analogy, but when I am riding my bike a lot and then take a break for repairs and walk more instead, I quickly get sore. Even after walking distances that I dont normally get sore from if I am bike free for a while and walking more regularly.
There have been such studies* of at least the first two, showing that pre-literate people are far better at memorizing (e.g., long epic poems) than literate people.
They were not "recited from memory" as we would understand that phrase today, though. Oral epic poets do not use the same wording every time they deliver the same poem.
Slide rules are actually my favorite thing.. two pieces of wood to leverage logarithmic relationships (quite abstract IMO) and compute faster. Just through gradual marks and a few concepts.
Alright it's indeed subtler than expected. Still a seemingly looking thing that is actually packed with mathematics. The point was a bit that sophistication doesn't come from the underlying technology.
What I like about slide rules is that they're not a black box. You can see it and manipulate as a physical object and you can develop an intuition around it.
You can easily use any checkered board as a binary calculator. I'm quite convinced that all the games like chess started life as things to do on your calculator when you were bored.
I agree. The over reliance on technology is making us less aware of our innate abilities to reason things out.
Easy access to information might make us "smarter" in a sense that we know how to find this information. But let's face it, we don't actually know how to find stuff. Google does that.
We just type simple questions that any 10 year old can do.
Another point, I have diplomas, am patient, like precision... then I watched youtube videos about electronics, woodwork etc.. and I saw how things are done. I expected easy transfer, yet when I tried to do them I struggled.
The reading knowledge is not know-how.. these are two distinct categories. The web gives you metadata in a way.. but so far it seems only experience gives you know-how. You can see all the diagrams about how to cut wood straight .. but until you saw all the ways you can fail your edge, curve your blade .. it's not 'can do' knowledge, only potential.
And I found this in dev too.. I've done tutorials, moocs, books about non trivial stuff.. but making an app was a totally different kind of effort. It wasn't intellectually hard, just different and you don't know that until you do it. Like hundreds of stupid details to juggle and go around to finish something properly.
Love it! I just googled that quote and you seem to have originated it. I have a little list of quotes and their authors. Do you mind revealing your name so I can attribute it? Or emailing me to the address in my profile?
The more you learn, the more the surface area of your inquiry expands. Each answer Spurs several new questions. A 20 year old will have far more sophisticated questions they want to ask and problems they need to solve than they would have had at 10.
Turing was explicitly trying to abstract from the sort of symbol manipulation mathematicians of his time did with pen and paper.
Presumably his angelic counterparts have no need of an infinite tape of finite symbols, and can use a single square with an infinite repertoire of symbols instead.
Turing was interested in mechanical manipulation. The church turning thesis showed that he neededn't have bothered since lambda calculus, a term rewriting system, is equivalent to a Turing machine and dozens of other methods of effective computation. You can pick which ever is the most aesthetically pleasing.
“A primitive form of harmonic series dates back to ancient Babylonian mathematics, where they were used to compute ephemerides (tables of astronomical positions).”
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 38.2 ms ] threadInteresting.
Some universities use “Department of Computing Science” as well as the English name.
That is, telescopes are, in practice, the most common way to learn about stars(/celstial bodies), but the stars are the target of study, with telescopes an incidental tool.
Computer science is about e.g. resource scaling for solving particular problems, with electronic computers just being one way those insights can be applied.
Lecture 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-J_xL4IGhJA
He explains that Computer Science is a terrible name – it's not a science, and "not about computers in the same sense that physics is not really about particle accelerators, and biology is not really about microscopes and petri dishes".
The more I read about math history the less I care about electronic computers. There was a lot of interesting problems and abstractions even 400 years ago. I find it funny that these people had no choice but to understand large and complex with nothing but pen and paper.. and it seems like the less computing power the smarter the thinking.
Some took it even further. The reason Plato gives for why Socrates wrote nothing down is that writing is an aid to memory and a form of crutch for the mind. And just as walking around on crutches will weaken a healthy man’s legs over time, so will leaning on writing weaken his memory.
Jobs says it in the presence of Brand in this Wired book excerpt [2], to which Ken Kesey [!] replies "It’s the next thing after acid!" [3]
0. https://medium.learningbyshipping.com/bicycle-121262546097
1. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24923004?seq=1#metadata_info_ta...
2. https://www.wired.com/story/how-doug-engelbart-pulled-off-th...
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Kesey
* Yes, citation needed. Searching...
Previously on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14640519
Slide rules go back all the way to the 17th century, and the abacus goes back thousands of years.
Romans engineers, for example, were known to carry portable hand abaci.
Slide Rule for the Modern Day:
https://www.instructables.com/Slide-Rule-for-the-Modern-Day/
I mean, the “knowledge” of where the marks go is not the same as the “know-how” required to put them there ;-)
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3615516?seq=1
(btw. are scihub links allowed on HN?)
http://jaanmarss.planet.ee/juhendid/Kaugrelvad_Antiik-Kreeka...
Easy access to information might make us "smarter" in a sense that we know how to find this information. But let's face it, we don't actually know how to find stuff. Google does that.
We just type simple questions that any 10 year old can do.
The reading knowledge is not know-how.. these are two distinct categories. The web gives you metadata in a way.. but so far it seems only experience gives you know-how. You can see all the diagrams about how to cut wood straight .. but until you saw all the ways you can fail your edge, curve your blade .. it's not 'can do' knowledge, only potential.
And I found this in dev too.. I've done tutorials, moocs, books about non trivial stuff.. but making an app was a totally different kind of effort. It wasn't intellectually hard, just different and you don't know that until you do it. Like hundreds of stupid details to juggle and go around to finish something properly.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_rewriting_system
Presumably his angelic counterparts have no need of an infinite tape of finite symbols, and can use a single square with an infinite repertoire of symbols instead.
> In this case, 50 stands for 5/6 and 8,20 stands for 8 1/2
So you win a point for demonstrating you read the article, and lose fifty for demonstrating you didn't grasp its meaning here.
8,20 is 8+20/60 = 8 1/3
“A primitive form of harmonic series dates back to ancient Babylonian mathematics, where they were used to compute ephemerides (tables of astronomical positions).”
Solid essay on ancient myth and “Snow Crash” here: https://www.cs.unc.edu/~taylorr/snowcrash.html
This is not a sure thing, by any means:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldest_profession_(phrase)
People do not automatically respect new professions.
Professions that very new are not respected due to lack of recognition; but some old professions are not highly respected either.
"Before that, He created the Heavens and the Earth out of Chaos, so architecture is the oldest profession" said the architect.
"Well, yes, but where do you think the Chaos came from?" asked the software developer.