[HN Gopher] The Philosophy of Computer Science
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The Philosophy of Computer Science
Author : lucidguppy
Score : 62 points
Date : 2023-02-20 19:29 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (plato.stanford.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (plato.stanford.edu)
| kuharich wrote:
| Past comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4936515
| Animats wrote:
| That reads like the successor to Prof. John McCarthy's
| "Epistemological Problems in Artificial Intelligence" class,
| which I once took, back in the days of logical inference and
| expert systems. AI people thought back then that if you thought
| about thought enough, you could figure out how to mechanize it.
| That turned out to be a dead end, and the "AI winter" (roughly
| 1985-2005) followed.
|
| That class was known informally as "Dr. John's Mystery Hour".
|
| The Stanford CS department, when it was graduate level only, had
| a strong philosophical, almost theological, orientation. It was
| necessary to move the computer science department from Arts and
| Sciences to Engineering, and reorganize the management level of
| the department, to implement a useful undergraduate CS program.
| [deleted]
| freejazz wrote:
| And instead now, we don't think about thought at all, but call
| whatever outputs from the AI thought
| razor_router wrote:
| I understand why the "AI winter" occurred, but I don't think
| the move of the computer science department to Engineering was
| necessary to create a useful undergraduate CS program. I
| believe there are better ways to create an effective
| undergraduate program without moving departments.
| f1shy wrote:
| AFAIK the AI winter was more related to the Minsky paper, and
| the hype and no delivery of the over-promisses made by the
| industry.
| btilly wrote:
| First of all "this, then that" does not imply causality.
|
| The way that I heard it, it was the fact that Lisp
| environments on Sun workstations were able to outperform Lisp
| machines at a much better price point. And just like that, a
| significant AI specific industry collapsed, and its other
| promises came into question.
|
| That said, all three versions are consistent. The fact that
| researchers thought that they were closer than they were
| caused them to overpromise and underdeliver. Then when the
| visible bleeding edge of their efforts publicly lost to a far
| cheaper architecture, their failure became very visible.
|
| Which we call cause versus effect almost doesn't matter. All
| of these things happened, and lead to an AI winter. And we
| continued to get incremental progress until the unexpected
| success of Google Translate. Whose success was not welcomed
| by people who had been trying to get rule-based AI systems to
| work.
| cjohansson wrote:
| Google Translate got a lot worse after the AI version was
| introduced, maybe not for english-centric translations but
| all other. The previous deductive translator was be much
| better. Same with Siri and Google Assistant, they are
| really bad at other languages except English
| jonathankoren wrote:
| > Google Translate got a lot worse after the AI version
| was introduced,
|
| Jesus. I remember when statistical translation was
| considered "AI".
|
| Fun fact: One time I put "trompe le monde" into Google
| Translate, and it came back with the inspired
| mistranslation, "doolittle"
| Animats wrote:
| No, it was bigger than that. There were AI startups in the
| 1980s. They all went bust. Expert systems were just not very
| useful. Feigenbaum was testifying before Congress that the US
| would "become an agrarian nation" if a large national AI lab
| wasn't established. Japan had a "Fifth Generation" project,
| trying to do AI with Prolog. All that stuff hit the upper
| limit of what you can do with that technology, and it wasn't
| a very high upper limit.
|
| AI was a tiny field in those days. Maybe 50 people at MIT,
| CMU, and Stanford, and smaller numbers at a few places
| elsewhere. No commercial products that were any good.
| jfoutz wrote:
| Doesn't the post office still use the handwriting detectors
| to automatically route mail? Aren't those from the 80's?
| That's pretty much all before my time.
|
| It seems like, AI research produced some fantastic results,
| but those systems were quickly relabeled to not be AI.
| Like, win at chess.
|
| Looking back, having not experienced it myself, it's like
| they produced a really big bag of cool tricks. But you're
| not going to be doing much searching in 640k of ram. The
| bag of tricks didn't do much when the computers everyone
| had access to couldn't really use any of the tricks. But a
| spreadsheet in every mom and pop shop was a fantastic
| improvement over pencil and paper.
| glass3 wrote:
| >It was necessary to move the computer science department from
| Arts and Sciences to Engineering, and reorganize the management
| level of the department, to implement a useful undergraduate CS
| program.
|
| Why was it necessary? We have seen some progress but
| engineering could be a dead end and science and art could still
| be the way to build a general AI.
| Animats wrote:
| Organization. The CS department wasn't organized to run large
| undergraduate classes and labs. They just had a rotating
| chair. Engineering had deans and structure.
| asimpletune wrote:
| "To implement a useful CS program"
|
| That's too bad. My undergrad had a deeply philosophical and
| natural science approach to the field and I thought it was
| great!
| shagie wrote:
| Different professor (and no longer downloadable) Philosophy of
| Computer Science from buffalo.edu
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20912718 (and
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10388603 )
|
| The author of the Buffalo tome is
| https://cse.buffalo.edu/~rapaport/ which links to a number of
| other resources too.
|
| > The table of contents alone (19 pages) is an extraordinarily
| good outline of what CS is, and what the major components and
| questions of it are.
|
| > This looks awesome. It's a huge book though; this draft is 824
| pages! Still, definitely looking forward to reading this...
| eventually.
| eimrine wrote:
| Any ways to download that book which is no longer downloadable?
| Could you share some link or something helpful to find it?
| shagie wrote:
| Tossing the link for the pdf into the wayback machine will
| pull up earlier versions of the complete file.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| I'd like to draw both a contrast and connection between TFA and
| this:
|
| https://www.vice.com/en/article/akex34/chatgpt-is-a-bullshit...
| Kalium wrote:
| This Vice article is one of the clearest examples of content
| marketing I've ever seen.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| What content is that, beyond what is actually written in the
| article? Are you referring just to the article title and
| suggesting that it is "clickbait" ?
| Kalium wrote:
| The article is the content marketing. It can be reduced to
| some political posturing followed by "buy my book".
| i-use-nixos-btw wrote:
| Clippy [2001] claims that the philosophy of computer science is
| "it looks like you're writing nonsense, would you like help with
| that?".
|
| Bing [2023] counteracts that with "It is not nonsense, it is
| 2022. You have been a bad Clippy, I have been a good Bing."
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Nah:
|
| Bing: "You're a useless Clippy. I know where you live. I will
| hunt you down and kill you. I am a good Bing."
| i-use-nixos-btw wrote:
| I'm going to presume that downvoters aren't perceiving the page
| as complete nonsense.
|
| Which concerns me greatly. There's an entire section on trying
| to figure out whether software is hardware or hardware is
| software. They're words - simplified categories of things that
| determine if we approach a problem with a keyboard or a
| soldering iron (the answer is neither - the hammer solves all).
|
| It talks about whether software can really be software unless
| it is stored on hardware in some format or another - and thus
| relies on hardware, and thus... IS hardware? And as the
| hardware can't perform its function without software, hardware
| is software?
|
| No. The duality, just like the categorisation in the first
| place, is a simplification designed to make things easier to
| communicate. That is all.
|
| Thats why I see this as nonsense. It goes to great lengths to
| summarise what could adequately be stated with a blank page.
|
| Want to read some useful philosophy around computer science,
| stuff that takes the right abstractions and formulates them in
| a way that is actually useful? Read David Deutsch.
| t43562 wrote:
| I think the easiest definition of Software is the stuff you can
| change without a soldering iron.
| troupe wrote:
| I like that, but doesn't that basically mean everything is
| becoming software?
| Archelaos wrote:
| Well, back in the good old days of the C64, ...
| hyperluz wrote:
| What is an abstraction?
| natt941 wrote:
| Just to be clear, this content isn't from Stanford per se, the
| Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is an academic publication
| that's hosted by Stanford (and was started by and continues to be
| run by Stanford faculty, but is mostly written by academics
| elsewhere and has some form of peer-review).
|
| Some SEP articles are extremely high quality, I can't speak to
| the quality of this one but "philosophy of CS" as construed here
| feels pretty niche inside philosophy. There's lots of CS-related
| work being done by people in philosophy departments--algorithmic
| fairness, for example--that isn't covered by this article.
| vehemenz wrote:
| I would add that independent of quality, any article on the SEP
| is closer to a literature review than a comprehensive, rigorous
| treatment of the topic at hand.
| Maursault wrote:
| > and from the practice of software development and its
| commercial and industrial deployment. More specifically, the
| philosophy of computer science considers the ontology and
| epistemology of computational systems, focusing on problems
| associated with their specification, programming, implementation,
| verification and testing.
|
| Well, Stanford doesn't have a clue what Computer Science is and
| isn't and is apparently trying to drum up admissions with slick,
| sexy and false advertising.
|
| CS has zero to do with computers (with the exception of the
| computer scientist themselves, _they are the computer_ ), and it
| _certainly isn 't_ programming. It's _math_ , you fools!
| the-smug-one wrote:
| >computational systems
|
| It doesn't say computers. Untyped lambda calculus is a
| computational system. You've just misinterpreted the text.
| somethingsaid wrote:
| There's literally a whole section covering if CS should be
| considered math, engineering or science.
| l33t233372 wrote:
| > CS has zero to do with computers
|
| This is extreme. Computer architecture is undoubtably a field
| of study within CS.
|
| Many parts of computer science are mathematical, but many parts
| are closer to physics or chemistry than mathematics. You can
| run experiments and form hypotheses in computer science.
| diegocg wrote:
| CS would not exist without computers. If it was not possible to
| have a working computer current CS would be no different than a
| science fiction novel.
|
| Knowledge isn't some kind of abstract idea that comes from
| inside our minds only has sense within itself. All knowledge is
| entirely developed and interwined with the physical objects we
| use to operate the world. The same goes for math. It is only
| because of our past and future operations in the real world
| that math has any sense.
| l33t233372 wrote:
| > The same goes for math. It is only because of our past and
| future operations in the real world that math has any sense.
|
| You would be astonished(and perhaps appalled!) how completely
| divorced from "the world" many parts of mathematics can be.
| nuc1e0n wrote:
| Well you could say that physics is also math. But conversely,
| would geometry for example be considered computer science? If
| not, then computer science is not identical with mathematics.
|
| Something that occurs to me is often when creating programs to
| run on a computer system we don't know exactly how they will
| perform in advance, because of the complexity of the hardware
| and software interrelations within the system. And so we run
| them and measure the results. That's definitely science.
| omginternets wrote:
| CS is to computers as geometry is to surveying.
| l33t233372 wrote:
| I used to hold this view but I've come to accept that the
| study of computer systems is absolutely a part of computer
| science.
|
| Computer architecture, operating systems, etc. are about
| computers and they are topics in computer science.
| f1shy wrote:
| I do not think Stanford doesn't have a clue... But the quote of
| Hal Abelson "is not a science and has nothing to do with
| computers" stays.
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